The Killer, David Fincher’s latest film, and his first Netflix film, opens with a profound gesture of negation. In a sustained opening scene, we meet the title character, only credited as “the killer,” a contract assassin played by Michael Fassbender, as he prepares for his next assignment in Paris. Setting up his equipment, laying eyes on his target, and preparing his getaway, the killer disposes of high concepts in a fifteen minute monologue, along with all transcendentals signifier and grand narratives. Citing the Bible as a mere “someone” he outlines a bland capitalist realist vision of a world in which “from the beginning of history the few have always exploited the many – this is the cornerstone of civilisation.” Blithely noting that millions of people are born and die every second, with nothing but the cold void beyond, he provides a radically denuded form of wisdom, a series of truistic aphorisms that seem to wither as soon as they leave his mouth: “Avoid being memorable – keep calm, keep moving.”

This is less a film opening than the evacuation of the metaphysics of presence of the film itself – an erosion of all the stances, spaces, professions and genres that once cloaked white male sociopathy as rugged heroic individualism. All that is left is a series of rote actions, a seething resentment and a crushing sense of boredom; a scenario that seems to spell the end of a certain scopic-sociopathic male gaze that was once synonymous with American cinema itself. Indeed, it is the killer’s gaze that is most murderous and deadening here, turning him into a director, a late ancestor of Hitchcock as he traces the scope of his rife across every person on the street below and in the apartment complex opposite, in a dystopian riff on Rear Window. Like Hitchcock, too, the killer spends so much time setting up his “shots” in advance that by the time he comes to execute them he has largely lost interest in the project. From and through his vantage point, the entire language of American cinema is both eroded and distilled, reimagined as an assassin’s sightline, a vehicle for unconscious, automatic violence.

In other words, The Killer not only presents us with a white male sociopath stripped of all the charisma, relevance and entertainment value that once allowed him to hide in plain sight, but a white male sociopath who is acutely and anxiously aware of this shift in his fortunes. For all that the killer invokes universal laws of survival, brutality and cyclical violence, it’s his own specific niche identity that causes him such anxiety, much as his supposedly clipped opening manifesto is actually the most bloviated moment in the film. He takes up space precisely by claiming to minimise himself, like the true kernel of Ted Lasso, and beneath all his philosophical posturing (or even his anti-philosophical posturing) his lifeworld comes down to one simple and recurring phrase: “I…don’t…give…a…fuck.” This is proceduralism as sociopathy – he approves of the “conscientious” work ethic of Gary Ridgway, the Green River Killer, and the most prolific serial killer in American history, although he is no serial killer himself but the latest and blandest iteration in the continuous escalation of white male identity politics in the United States. In fact, the figure of the serial killer feels like ancient history when watching the killer, who is closer to a glaciated mass shooter, or a spree killer working in extreme slow motion, distributing a murderous impulse across an entire lifetime.

Of course, Fincher has to spin this into a feature length film, much as the killer has to find a way to narrativise his own sociopathy, and this brings us to two of the more unsettling elements of The Killer – the way in which the killer rehearses both interpersonal intimacy and aesthetic appreciation in a purely role and formalist manner. Insofar as a narrative exists, it emerges from the second chapter, in which the killer returns home to find that his girlfriend Magdala, played by Sophie Charlotte, has been attacked in their Dominican Republic house. Yet as much as this fuels a desire for revenge, this central relationship feels curiously empty, devoid of everything apart from the need for the killer to possess such a romantic connection in order to humanise his actions. Likewise, the killer rotates through one motif of intimacy after another – we learn that he likes “proximity work,” we meet him sheltering in the midst of a WeWork space that is under construction, and he uses the pseudonym Felix Unger, one half of television and cinema’s The Odd Couple, but without anybody except the audience, or his own echo chamber, to make this once folksy friendship ramify in any way in the present.

In an older kind of film, such a killer might also be humanised, or at least endowed with some charisma, by virtue of their aesthetic appreciation, however twisted it might be. Here, too, there are echoes of this older instinct, as the killer rotates through the entire Smiths discography in transit from one job to the next, and from each of the film’s highly episodic chapters to the next. Yet we only ever hear snatches of these iconic songs, often at their least iconic moments, which are quickly subsumed into the more pervasive soundscape of the film, a cold noise composed of the metallic, industrial and inhuman textures of continuous transit. Not even irony operates here, as Fincher sets the scansion of Morrissey’s lyrics alongside the killer’s recitation of statistics on storage units, observations on the global population crisis, and other similarly banal reflections. For this killer is totally uninterested in aestheticising himself or his crimes, existing at the other extremity of the murderous spectrum from the killer of Se7en, of which this film often plays as a late denuded echo. After a while, this killer starts to feel basic above all else – in the way he speaks, in the way he dresses and above all in the way that he tries to invest his sociopathy with a fleeting figment of gravitas or hubris.

The Killer thus offers us a post-Bond, post-Bourne globetrotting narrative (at one point a gun dealer tells our sceptical protagonist that a weapon is “good enough for James Bond”) that takes place in the same transitional transnational universe as Christopher Nolan’s Tenet. We are never too far from airports, airport-adjacent neighbourhoods or drone shots, much as the Dominican Republic chapter sees the killer tracing a taxi driver’s route from his airport to his house and then back to the airport once more. Each subsequent chapter is full of regional details that never quite amount to regional texture, producing a beautifully noirish aesthetic that nevertheless lacks any significant stakes. At times it reminded me of the disinterested and distended global space that we glimpse at the start of William Friedkin’s 1970s neoliberal trilogy – The French Connection, The Exorcist and Sorcerer – since here the power network also remains almost entirely opaque. Even when the killer finally tracks down the man responsible for the hit on his girlfriend, played by Arliss Howard, his criminal tendencies are gestural more than substantive: talking about Bitcoin and interval training in a high-end gym locker room, serving expensive wine while discussing tax burden offsets in a Sub Pop T-shirt.

Even in his denuded form and even against this parched backdrop, however, the killer cannot prevent the inevitable decline of what remains of his subjectivity and worldview. For all the precision of his mantras, the opening scene in fact represents him at his sloppiest, since at the critical moment when the hit is supposed to come together, he shifts his scope to take in a leather-clad sex worker, a lapse of judgement that causes him to miss his target, and so set the revenge hit on his girlfriend in motion. Once upon a time the male gaze seamlessly synergised both the violence and sensuality of looking, fusing competitive aggression towards other men and clinical ogling of women in a fully naturalised package, but Fincher’s film takes place in the dissociation between these two tendencies. Despite (or perhaps because of) all the killer’s desperate efforts to preserve it, the male gaze implodes in this opening scene, losing its preternatural and prehensile powers of control, and prompting a breakdown in extreme slow motion, as if the last resort of the white male sociopath were to colonise Chantal Akerman’s Jeanne Dielman as a vehicle for his angst. The killer becomes more evacuated, emasculated and just plain daggy as the film proceeds, rotating through an ever more basic selection of bucket hats, and reserving his most vitriolic violence not for the business man who set up the hit on his girlfriend but for the Latino middle men, muscular “creatine junkies” who have eclipsed the masculine authority he once thought of as his own.

As the third act of the film rolls around then, everything is suffused with a sense of finitude, a generalised end of things that removes any real stakes from the narrative. We finish with two kills that are neither cathartic nor austere in their lack of catharsis, instead fading into nothingness, into the imminent oblivion that Tilda Swinton’s cameo articulates as “last minutes knowing they’re last minutes.” Likewise, the epilogue back in the Dominican Republic doesn’t even feel like a purely formal gesture so much as a kind of aesthetic of inertia, the arc just spinning itself out now for those viewers who can’t be bothered to change to the next movie, or consider it easier to simply wait for the closing scene to come to an end so that the next movie will transition automatically as the credits roll. And this is the ultimate statement of The Killer – to devolve the white male sociopath, once so exotic and charismatic in Se7en, to nothing more than inertia, a powerful aesthetic gesture in and of itself, but also something of a dead end in Fincher’s career, and so hopefully a platform for a new pivot in his late work.