Some artists chose to follow their desire to show the unpleasant, to hit hard our visual sensitivity. For one reason or another, there is many of them. David Fincher makes such cinema. Fincher has been working on movies since very young: he was part of George Lucas’ technical team for the special effects in The Return of the Jedi, The NeverEnding Story, and Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom. Fincher was thought to have all his duck in one row when he was assigned to direct Alien 3, but disagreements between its producers led to the movie being reworked and re-edited several times. When its director’s cut came out in 2003, Fincher has already four other features under his belt. Seven is the one that established him as a filmmaker. It is also the film that shows what making movies means to him: never going down the easy path, working with the annoying, even the irritating, capturing the audience and shock them.
His second feature is not as successful. The Game didn’t earn much. It will soon be forgotten thanks to another perfect hit, Fight Club, a true descent into hell with a non-metaphorical explosion at the end. Panic Room is also praised by critics for its anxiety-ridden, claustrophobic atmosphere.
Zodiac is, for Fincher, a bit of a turning point. When watched after his earlier works, it is apparent that that’s where he wanted to end up all along. It’s not really about the senseless murders as it is about the exhaustion felt by investigators looking for the killer. A frustration that leads nowhere as the story remains without an end nor a culprit. The cast is amazing and the director repays the chance he’d been given with a story of raw, gory, dark images also thanks to the actors’ expressivity. Fincher’s cinema does that a lot.
His later work is more reflective, and yet, both in The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, in The Social Network, and lastly in Gone Girl, we do find some provocation here and there, though not necessarily by means of provocative imagery as much as in the behaviour of the characters. Lit up, bedazzled, or occasionally barely visible, clad in black light (a legacy of Fincher’s experience in VFX) these people take with them their anxiety, their behavioural issues, their neuroses, up to the point they go off in pure violence, also and above all psychological.
At the 80th Venice Film Festival, David Fincher will present The Killer, with lead actor – once again – Brad Pitt.
The film’s protagonist is a ruthless, cold-blooded killer living in a world that has seemingly lost all moral and civil principles. A killer who studies his targets with the coldness of a predator and the clear-headedness of a professional, observing their every movement. At...
A horrifying story on the seven capital sins bathed in penumbra. When Kevin Spacey enters the scene, good luck everyone else.
How to go berserk and invent a life of violence and Nazi-like revanche, up to the point you realize that absolute evil is none else than yourself.
A game of obsessions between one killer, one comic artist, and one detective – all for nothing. They’ll never know who Zodiac is, all the while the solution was right there before them.
Old Benjamin is born at the end of World War I and dies an infant just before Katrina hits New Orleans. Great physicality from Brad Pitt.
An investigation not of the man who wrote Citizen Kane, but of a man who faced the fate of not being regarded as he deserved and accepted it.
