MovieChat Forums > The Killer (2023) Discussion > Did the killer betray himself subconscio...

Did the killer betray himself subconsciously when he missed?


So there he is. Paris.

The target. The dominatrix.

The dominatrix moves and then he pulls the trigger. In that precise order.

We hear The Smiths How Soon is Now?:

"There's a club if you'd like to go
You could meet somebody who really loves you
So you go and you stand on your own
And you leave on your own
And you go home and you cry
And you want to die"

"And you want to die" is heard. The dominatrix moves. Then the killer pulls the trigger and misses. In that precise order. A coincidence?

The song also says:

"You shut your mouth
How can you say
I go about things the wrong way?
I am human and I need to be loved
Just like everybody else does

When you say it's gonna happen now
When exactly do you mean?
See I've already waited too long
And all my hope is gone"

Under this light, and given that the Killer eventually retires, maybe we can ignore his 'there's no fate' and 'the only life path lies behind'. That's what he thinks as a killer, but maybe a glimpse of fate, of the boyfriend-as-a-retired-killer got in the way when the dominatrix moved...from the left - from the sinister side.

Hence his left eye twitch at the end. We are like him, weak, one of the many, and as The Smiths say in How Soon Is Now?:

"You shut your mouth
How can you say
I go about things the wrong way?
I am human and I need to be loved
Just like everybody else does"

How could he miss? How could he go about things the wrong way?

The Expert speaks about the impossibility of another life, but the Killer ends up having another life, as boyfriend or husband. But between two lives there must be a death. Hence the relevance of the lyric 'and you want to die'.

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Without having paid attention to those precise details, I did read it as a sort of subconscious action to make a 'mistake'. That was more based on the monologuing -- and especially the sort of 'pep talk' aspects of his monologuing -- and the waiting, waiting, waiting underscoring the emptiness, monotony and inherent meaninglessness of the lifestyle.

On the other hand, you could also say that if he doesn't miss the movie can't happen. So there's that too.

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[deleted]

Half of what he said he contradicted. I was thinking is this guy full of himself or what.

The movie didn't let on that this guy may be full of shit, and he wasn't supposed to be the hero we shouldn't be cheering for.

Most of the things he said in the inner monologues were broken, or contradicted within the same scene or later.

Did I get it wrong, or is there something I missed in the subtext? (what subtext?)

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It's not that he contradicted himself, it just shows that he's human, the one thing he spends the first 10 minutes of the movie explaining. He has a sort of basic playbook he tries to follow and the movie shows what can happen when you're not that coldhearted and try to be more human than the rules - he shouldn't have gone home, but he did; he shouldn't have had mercy on the secretary, but he did.

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You are both right in a way. The killer is too much of a human; but then, perversely, that human is too much of a killer - and therefore not very human. So his basic program (killer) gets infected by a more insidious, weaker one (boyfriend).

In fact, he looks like a replicant.

A bit like Deckard/K in Blade Runner, a bit like Walter/David in Prometheus/Covenant. Maybe that's why Fassbender was cast.

He becomes disoriented after missing, and then he cures his inner vertigo by getting to the top of that tower. The Expert was onto something when she said he wanted to be reassurance, although wrong about the 'there's no other life'.

And the names Magdala and Hitchcock's Madeleine (from Vertigo) are related etimologically, so maybe that's a wink on Fincher's part. Like Scottie, the Killer sort of sleepwalks through the film.

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He is on autopilot because he believes that discipline will save him. As it does with the q-tip lady.
And being a killer, a hunter, IS a human trait. He has simply taken the emotion out of it and takes simple enjoyment in the craft. Like doctors do, only in reverse, with the opposite goal..

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The Killer is a bad assassin. He has at least THREE major fuck ups throughout the movie.

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