The Accountant

Gavin O’Connor’s film starts from an inversion. Producer Mark Williams brought screenwriter Bill Dubuque the idea of a financial thriller, and Dubuque proposed moving the accountant onto the autism spectrum. The script reached the 2011 Black List, the annual survey of unproduced screenplays, and needed five more years to reach cinemas. O’Connor had Dubuque widen the father and son material so the flashbacks would account for the present tense skills. The consequence is structural: the childhood scenes are not atmosphere, they are the film’s justification system, and every ability Christian displays is issued a receipt there. If that tidiness reads as mechanical, the film will seem to keep showing its working. The fighting was chosen on the same logic. O’Connor has said he picked silat because it is showy yet extremely efficient, and because the character’s question is how to remove an opponent by the shortest route. Encounters therefore never extend; they close in a few moves. The Treasury investigation runs as a separate strand and unties its knot through one long stretch of telling rather than action. A good fit if a fight that ends in seconds reads as arithmetic rather than as a missing set piece. Less so if using autism as the key that unlocks every skill is a framing you keep at arm’s length.