The completist and the Kubrick enthusiast in me could never quite figure out why I overlook The Killing when in one glorious week about 5 or 6 years ago I watched every single film Stanley Kubrick had ever made. Yes, even Fear and Desire, but not The Killing. Over the years, I've gone back to most of them several times but this one had always slipped under my radar. Until today that is.
It's a strange experience, watching for the first time a film by a director so widely admired as to be not just familiar to all cinephiles, but almost synonymous with cinema itself; all the more curious for the fact that The Killing came so early in the legendary auteur's career. In retrospect, it can be viewed as an early signifier of everything that came to embody his peculiar artistic vision, but also as a stand-alone piece far removed from the rest of his filmography. Of course, anyone who's familiar with the director's work knows that despite the presence of many threads that sew his work into a uniform oeuvre - the formal rigor, the fastidiously constructed narratives, the music, the all-encompassing conformity to his vision of everyone involved - every single one of his films has an identity fully of its own. He tackled as wide a range of themes and genres as possible within his filmography, but for the most part, his films didn't bend to the rules of those genres. His presence behind the camera dominated everything about each film. But even for a director of his ilk, The Killing is distinct enough to be mistaken for another filmmaker's work. It possesses neither the formal rigidity of his later films nor their impenetrable characters that can be carefully observed but not intimately immersed in.
