Netflix’s The Killer looks like the movie the Hitman games deserve

Netflix released the first trailer on Tuesday for The Killer, David Fincher’s latest psychological action thriller starring Michael Fassbender as a methodical and highly trained assassin undergoing a crisis of conscience while on assignment in Paris. The trailer is quintessential Fincher: a fast-cut montage of scenes of Fassbender narrating his gradual psychological breakdown filled with sickly yellow hues and icy turquoise lighting, powered by an ominous, thrumming electronic score by Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross.

My immediate first reactions to the trailer were (a) this looks incredible, and (b) I wish there was a Hitman movie that looked like this.

While Fincher’s film is based on a 1998 French graphic novel by writer Alexis Nolent and illustrator Luc Jacamon, it could easily pass for a loose adaptation set in the world of IO Interactive’s stealth action games with only a few tweaks. To be fair, there have been two movies based on Hitman to date, in the form of 2007’s Hitman and 2015’s Hitman: Agent 47; neither adaptation has quite captured the effortlessly cool aesthetic or psychological intrigue of either the franchise or its bald-headed protagonist.

While Fincher’s film obviously owes a debt to Jean-Pierre Melville’s 1967 crime thriller Le Samouraï, with Fassbender a contemporary stand-in for Alain Delon’s character Jef Costello, the trailer emanates the same steely-eyed focus and frenetic action of IO Interactive’s flagship franchise. Truth be told, the teaser for The Killer reminds me a lot of the announcement trailer for 2016’s Hitman, in how they both offer a peek into the minds and modus operandi of their respective main characters.

The Killer will co-star Arliss Howard (Full Metal Jacket), Charles Parnell (Top Gun: Maverick), and Tilda Swinton (Three Thousand Years of Longing) alongside Michael Fassbender, and will open in theaters for a limited release on Oct. 27 ahead of its streaming debut on Nov. 10.