The Killers

A noir-inflected adaptation of Hemingway's spare, fatalistic story about hired killers and their doomed target, marked by existential dread and moral ambiguity.

The Killers is a 1956 student film by the Soviet and Russian film director Andrei Tarkovsky and his fellow students Marika Beiku and Aleksandr Gordon. The film is based on the short story "The Killers" by Ernest Hemingway, written in 1927. It was Tarkovsky's first film, produced when he was a student at the State Institute of Cinematography.