Kaurismaki brings his unmistakable style—and gallows humour—to London as he teams up with French icon Jean-Pierre Leaud for a darkly comic take on one man’s desire to end his life.

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The expression ‘waiting to die’ is given new meaning in Aki Kaurismaki’s early ‘90s work, I Hired a Contract Killer.  When a man attempts to commit suicide but fails repeatedly, he decides to call a hitman to kill him. 

So he sits and waits until he realises that there may be more to life than it seems and has what could be the worst form of buyer’s remorse.  There is no refund in this self-inflicted game of life and death. 

Conceptually, it’s morbid but darkly comic, full of the gallows humour that we would expect from a story like this.  That suicidal man is Henri Boulanger, who was recently fired from his monotonous desk job and doesn’t know what else to do. 

In a rare case of Kaurismaki not centering his narrative on a lonely, nondescript Finnish guy in Helsinki, I Hired a Contract Killer sees the auteur bringing his unmistakable deadpan filmmaking style to London. 

“Why don’t you do it yourself and save some money?”

And not just that, he teams up with French icon Jean-Pierre Leaud who plays Henri.  Leaud would wait for another 26 years to make another film about a man also waiting to die—the underappreciated masterwork by Albert Serra from 2016 called The Death of Louis XIV. 

Love can make those serious blues go away, serendipitously sparked when Henri encounters a woman he sees a future with at a nearby bar. 

Leaud’s poker-face performance plays to Kaurismaki’s all-too-familiar screen archetype, but it is the director’s attempt at a noir thriller that gives the film some kind of stylistic impetus. 

Numerous shots reveal the dingy, moody use of colours as well as a sense of the ‘underbelly’ of London, even if his mise-en-scene is clearly artificially constructed.  While it isn’t ultimately a great work, I Hired a Contract Killer should prove to be moderately interesting to new or old fans alike.

Grade: B

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Promo Clip: