MASTERING

“The Killer” and The Holdovers.”

- ANTHONY LANE

A dozen years have passed since “Shame,” in which Michael Fass bender played an unappeasable sex addict named Brandon, and I remember wondering, back then, what Brandon would do once the juice ran dry. Sell real estate, perhaps? Get married, raise three kids, and work on his short game on weekends? Another possibility is suggested by “The Killer,” a new film from David Fincher, in which Fassbender— still lean and staring, spookily unchanged by time—takes the role of a professional assassin. I can’t prove anything, but I suspect that he is Brandon reloaded. From picking up strangers on the subway to picking them off with a silenced rifle, through a hotel window, is just a hop and a skip.

Fassbender is one of those actors who seem alone even when they’re in company. He specializes in the hard, the hollow, and the robotic, and the anonymous figure he plays in “The Killer”—which is based on a multivolume graphic novel by Alexis Nolent—spends the first half hour or so in monkish solitude. He waits in empty rooms on the top floor of an apartment building, in Paris, preparing to shoot someone across the way. He has a gun, a telescopic sight, and a watch that measures his pulse. (No trigger should be squeezed until the rate drops below sixty.) Determined to leave no trace, he wears gloves at all times and dozes on a workbench as if it were an operating table. And, in voice-over, he talks to us.