David Finch­er will adapt French graph­ic nov­el ​‘The Killer’ for his next film

Despite some polar­ized reviews for Mank, Net­flix-Finch­er rela­tions remain sta­ble and ami­ca­ble. Though the accom­plished film­mak­er still has an awards sea­son in front of him to get through, he’s start­ed work on a new fea­ture, anoth­er col­lab­o­ra­tion with the stream­ing mega-stu­dio and a return to his home-turf genre.

Dead­line reports that David Finch­er​’s next film will be an adap­ta­tion of the French graph­ic nov­el ​‘The Killer’, which will steer him back toward the ser­i­al-mur­der demi­monde in which he’s spent most of his career. His mul­ti-year con­tract with Net­flix means he’ll pro­duce the film there, though this par­tic­u­lar project has been in the works since as far back as 2007 over at Paramount.

The orig­i­nal com­ic series focused on an assas­sin ​“who begins to have a psy­cho­log­i­cal cri­sis in a world with no moral com­pass,” a tale of noir-inflect­ed sus­pense steeped in dark­ness. As he car­ries out his assign­ments, he sinks deep­er into mad­ness, and his sur­round­ings soon fol­low – very much in the same rup­tured vein as Sev­en.

All too appro­pri­ate­ly, the script will be drawn up by Kevin Walk­er, Fincher’s co-writer on that ear­ly tri­umph of his career. In equal­ly intrigu­ing per­son­nel news, Michael Fass­ben­der is cur­rent­ly being float­ed as the odds-on name for the epony­mous role, though his involve­ment has yet to be con­firmed. (Report­ed­ly, his com­mit­ment has been firmed up over a series of meet­ings, though any­one fol­low­ing Hol­ly­wood news has heard that one before.)

By this point, we’ve got a pret­ty good idea about what to expect from a Finch­er killer-thriller, but this concept’s ori­gins as a graph­ic nov­el may demand fresh styl­is­tic inno­va­tion from the well-known tech­ni­cal per­fec­tion­ist. Each vari­a­tion on the themes of obses­sion and alien­ation has a look of its own, and this one could be the most brac­ing­ly unteth­ered from real­i­ty yet.