It’s often said about George Clooney that he’s an old-fashioned movie star, in the mold of Cary Grant, a personality so affable that audiences seem unconsciously predisposed to like him the moment he graces the screen. But in the opening sequence of The American, director Anton Corbijn is quick to make Clooney’s character, Jack, challenge just how much goodwill you’re willing to extend to him. In the wake of a casually cold-hearted act committed in the quiet snows of Sweden, Corbijn and Clooney ask the audience to empathize with the sort of man who isn’t allowed to have friends, because his profession dictates that they are expendable liabilities.

The American is ostensibly a thriller, but in a quiet mold far removed from the jittery live-wires of Bourne or Bond. There is action to be had here, but if you’ve seen the 90-second trailer, then you’ve seen the majority of it.

Corbijn and screenwriter Rowan Joffee take Martin Booth’s meditative novel, A Very Private Gentleman, and create a minimal, elegiac character study of an assassin looking to stop taking the lives of others and start living one of his own. The novel is largely built from internal monologues and memories, but Corbijn is only interested in what can be seen, in the here and now. No narrations, no flashbacks. He trusts that everything else can be conveyed through the melancholy and menace with which he infuses every frame, and those same qualities in Clooney’s reserved performance.