Killing time
Ticket Stubs #4: David Fincher overthinks murder in ‘The Killer’ while Eli Roth has gory, nostalgic fun in ‘Thanksgiving’.
We are meant, I think, (I hope), to regard The Killer as a pseud, the sort of shallow-profound gymbro who tries to recruit you to crypto, no-fap, or multi-level marketing. He thinks in slogans, like an aphoristic Andrew Tate… It’s a relief every time Morrissey interrupts. That girlfriend in a coma is getting off lightly.
Ticket Stubs is a movie column reviewing new and not-so-new releases, Hollywood classics, nostalgic trash, and more obscure cinematic fare. This is Ticket Stubs #4.
The Killer
David Fincher, 2023
Thanksgiving
Eli Roth, 2023
Two directors, each having distinguished himself with austerely intimate portraits of unknowable men, have made movies this year in which their subjects remain unknown when the credits roll.
This may have been intentional in one or other film but I’m not sure it works in either. In July, Christopher Nolan, who brought to the screen Leonard Shelby (Guy Pearce) in Memento, Batman (Christian Bale) in The Dark Knight trilogy, and Joseph Cooper (Matthew McConaughey) in Interstellar — all difficult, taciturn men whom we nevertheless come to understand — brought us J. Robert Oppenheimer (Cillian Murphy) in Oppenheimer, a grand, sonorous endurance test of a movie in which we spend 187 minutes with one of the most accomplished performers of his generation and still come away with only the vaguest impression of his subject.
Now David Fincher takes us along with the eponymous anonymous assassin of his new movie The Killer, played by Michael Fassbender, as he botches a hit in Paris, finds his lady friend brutalised as punishment, and sets out to even the score with those responsible. This reads like the plot to umpteen revenge movies, not least Kill Bill: Volume 1 (Quentin Tarantino, 2003) and Volume 2 (2004), but funky as the soundtracks to those movies are, neither features The Bride slaying her erstwhile colleagues while rocking out to The Smiths. (For all his character flaws, Fassbender’s antihero has a Spotify playlist that slaps.)
The Killer, however, is an anti-action movie. There are scenes of abrupt, ferocious violence — pro-tip: never let your guard down around a nail gun — but they are dramatic necessities in what is really a revenge procedural. (Recall that Fincher’s Zodiac contains only brief, tightly controlled spurts of violence in 157 minutes about a serial killer.) We accompany The Killer — his real name is never confirmed — a clinical, ascetic hitman for hire, as he awaits the arrival at a Parisian hotel of his unnamed target. The Killer seldom speaks but he never shuts up, filling his time and ours with interior monologues about the science of assassination:
My process is purely logistical, narrowly focused by design. I’m not here to take sides. It's not my place to formulate any opinion. No one who can afford me needs to waste time winning me to some cause. I serve no god or country. I fly no flag. If I’m effective, it’s because of one simple fact: I. Don’t. Give. A. Fuck.
Sweet Christ, would you hurry up and kill someone.
We are meant, I think, (I hope), to regard The Killer as a pseud, the sort of shallow-profound gymbro who tries to recruit you to crypto, no-fap, or multi-level marketing. He thinks in slogans, like an aphoristic Andrew Tate:
Stick to your plan. Anticipate, don’t improvise. Trust no one. Never yield an advantage. Fight only the battle you’re paid to fight. Forbid empathy. Empathy is weakness. Weakness is vulnerability.
It’s a relief every time Morrissey interrupts. That girlfriend in a coma is getting off lightly.
The movie plays out across six chapters. In Paris, our antihero trains his rifle on The Target but accidentally shoots the professional dom who has joined him in his hotel room. The Killer clears out and heads for the Dominican Republic, location of The Hideout where he finds his side piece Magdala (Sophie Charlotte) savagely cut up and barely alive. The Client, it seems, has expressed his displeasure with that missed shot. After eliminating a luckless local drawn into the attack, The Killer flies to New Orleans for a meeting with The Lawyer, who doesn’t realise he’s in his last billable hour.
The Lawyer, played by Charles Parnell (Top Gun: Maverick, not Irish Parliamentary Party), is actually The Killer’s handler and one of those responsible for putting Magdala in the hospital. That doesn’t work out well for him. Fassbender’s character makes tracks to Florida for some brutal hand-to-hand combat with The Brute (Sala Baker) and then to New York for a last supper with The Expert, a scotch-swilling Tilda Swinton. The narrative zooms in like the focus on a rifle scope until The Killer arrives in the Chicago apartment of The Client (Arliss Howard), the tech billionaire who commissioned his failed hit.
Fincher’s twelfth directorial feature, an adaptation of the French comic book Le Tueur, has been released on Netflix alongside a limited theatrical run. That might explain why his camera is less adventurous here. There is some of the panache we have become accustomed to but none of the visual inventiveness of, say, Panic Room (2002) or The Curious Case of Benjamin Button (2008). There are some familiar concerns — obsession, puzzles, male psychology — but strip the titles and credits from this piece and you might struggle to identify it as a Fincher movie. It is also a film seemingly at odds with itself, both satirising its lead’s vapid philosophising and asking us to buy that someone whose stream of consciousness sounds like a comment left underneath a Jocko Willink video would conclude his confrontation with The Client in the way he does.
Incidentally, those scenes and the choices Fincher makes in them are among the movie’s strongest points. They are bold and counterintuitive but make perfect sense — just not for this character. Fincher sometimes appears highly ambivalent about his leads — e.g. The Social Network — but never as ambivalent as this. The Killer rhymes off his rules and his process, a freelance directing his own way of life, but in his contractual existence of lonely anonymity and conspicuous consumption (sustaining himself on McDonald’s, minus the buns; buying cheapo burglary equipment off Amazon) he captures the precariousness of millennial existence. He’s the ultimate gig economy worker. Even his style of dress is dictated by his work, kitting himself out like an innocuous German tourist, all in beige with a bucket hat. (On the poster, the hat has the faintest echo of a stahlhelm.) It’s as though Fincher is trying to create a Tyler Durden that no one will mistake for cool.
There has been a good deal of praise for The Killer’s tense dinner table exchange with The Expert, much of it directed at Tilda Swinton’s performance, and for admirers of Swinton’s dramatic style it will confirm her gift for subtle yet striking turns. But this is Fassbender’s movie, a showcase for that smouldering expression that you can never be entirely at ease with. He does things with his eyes that other actors couldn’t do with every muscle in their body. The Killer is a frustrating movie but there is nothing frustrating about Fassbender’s performance. He keeps us at a distance and leaves us both yearning to get closer and afraid we might.
Grindhouse, a 2007 double feature of Robert Rodriguez’s Planet Terror and Quentin Tarantino’s Death Proof, included trailers for non-existent exploitation movies of the style cranked out in grindhouse theatres in the Seventies.
There was ‘Machete’, a Danny Trejo action vehicle shot by Rodriguez; ‘Werewolf Women of the SS’, Rob Zombie’s nod to the Nazisploitation sub-genre; ‘Don’t’, a Hammer-esque house-of-horrors number from Edgar Wright; ‘Thanksgiving’, Eli Roth’s holiday-centric slasher; and ‘Hobo with a Shotgun’, Jason Eisener’s take on vigilante flicks. Machete and Hobo with a Shotgun were expanded into feature films in 2010 and 2011 respectively but it was for a feature-length version of Roth’s concept that fans really clamoured, and now he has served it up with all the trimmings.
Thanksgiving is an unapologetic throwback to the calendar slashers that came in the wake of Halloween (John Carpenter, 1978). Movies like Friday the 13th (Sean S Cunningham, 1980), My Bloody Valentine (George Mihalka, 1981), Happy Birthday to Me (J. Lee Thompson, 1981), and Silent Night, Deadly Night (Charles Sellier, 1984), in which the youth of America — though sometimes the youth of Canada pretending to be the youth of America — were dispatched in inventively gory ways by masked psychopaths in between schtupping and getting high. These are the films Roth grew up on — his bar mitzvah party was a screening of Mother’s Day (Charles Kaufman, 1980) held in the family basement — and Thanksgiving is his loving tribute.
It’s a ‘one year later’ movie, as these affairs often are. One Thanksgiving in Plymouth, Massachusetts, a Black Friday sale at the local big box store turns deadly after a group of friends — the usual teen slasher archetypes — sneak in early and taunt the throngs outside. Incensed, the crowd overwhelms the puny security detail and forms a stampede of bargain-hunters who trample some unfortunate staff and customers in search of a discounted waffle iron.
The teens survive the carnage but one year later — there it is — someone still resents their role in the tragedy and is bent on making them pay. Kitted out as a pilgrim and concealed behind a mask depicting early settler John Carver, the killer stalks them according to the part they played in the riot. (Think I Know What You Did Last Summer meets Final Destination.) He tags his prey on social media to images of a Thanksgiving table with their names on it, alongside the severed head of his latest victim. And you thought marshmallow-topped yams were the yuckiest thing served on the fourth Thursday in November.
Even among aficionados of splatter, Eli Roth is a hit-or-miss moviemaker. At his best (Cabin Fever, Hostel), he marshals dark comedy, viscerality, and nostalgia into cynical anti-morality plays in which good guys always get it and obnoxiousness is almost a virtue. At his worst (Green Inferno, Death Wish), he is a trying-too-hard Tarantino knock-off prisoner to the exploitation canon and satirical in shallow and unconvincing ways. Thanksgiving is Roth at his best.
It has the rhythm of those early Eighties slashers down to every last beat: the final girl (Jessica here, played by Nell Verlaque) who senses threats everyone else misses; the bumbling cops and clueless authority figures; the inventive kills and grisly make-up effects; and the quippy, misanthropic dialogue that captures how teenagers actually speak. Throw on some grain and scratch effects in Avid, lower the lighting a little, drop the social media and cellphones and you could almost believe this was a lost title from the era it pays homage to. (One aspect that cuts against this is how remarkably light the movie is on T&A, borderline sacrilegious in a tribute to slasher movies.)
Thanksgiving isn’t without its flaws. The identity of the killer seemed obvious to me early on and there’s a scene two-thirds of the way through that drops a massive hint. Then again, the movies Roth is tipping his hat to were often hackneyed and predictable in their final-reel reveals. Characters also have an annoying tendency to walk alone down dark hallways and through abandoned parking lots as though they’ve never seen a horror movie. Plymouth embraces the Murray Hamilton approach to risk management: even with the bodies piling up, and the killer making clear his intention to turn the town’s Thanksgiving parade into a charnel house, everyone turns out to line the streets, all but volunteering themselves for his hatchet.
So it’s a bit hard to sympathise when the townsfolk respond to the inevitable massacre by gathering to protest the authorities allowing the parade to go ahead. (At least they manage to form a mob without anyone chanting ‘Evil dies tonight’.) Again, though, it’s standard fare in movies like this for towns living in the shadow of a monstrous menace to make terrible decisions about public safety. If the mayor in Jaws (Steven Spielberg, 1975) had listened to Chief Brody, there would be no movie.
There is the pointed commentary we’ve come to expect from Roth, here focusing on contemporary mores and in particular those around social media. Carver’s use of social media to punish the teens for their transgressions is a fairly on-the-nose reference to cancel culture. There’s also an amusing scene where a high school boy guarantees himself the cooing attentions of the girls in the class by giving a speech denouncing the celebration of Thanksgiving. Roth is on the left politically but he seems to derive satisfaction from poking at the pieties of contemporary progressivism. The dialogue is also pithy. (‘If we let the police handle this, we’re all gonna be 50% off.’)
Thanksgiving doesn’t do anything particularly original, but then it doesn’t set out to. If it smooths over the rough edges of the exploitation movie, that is simply a reflection of changed times and mores. It is a fun movie and that’s all it wants to be. No straining for relevance, no culture-war baggage, no gatekeeping fandom, no background mythology homework required before watching. Movies like this, movies that are pure entertainment and satisfied to be nothing more, are becoming harder to find. This year I’m thankful for Thanksgiving.
The Killer streaming on Netflix; Thanksgiving in theatres now.
I tried but failed to watch the Killer - I watched some paint dry instead.