Some murders just won’t lie down and die. The man who called himself Zodiac is officially linked to five killings, though in letters to the press he claimed as many as 37. For several years from 1969 he terrorized the San Francisco area, taunting the authorities with frequent cryptic messages that received front-page treatment. Despite this weakness for self-publicity, and despite failing to finish off two of his victims, who were able to describe their ordeal in some detail, the Zodiac continued to elude the police, and eventually the trail went cold.
Fincher lays out every facet of the case in methodical detail, beginning with the second (or is it the third?) crime scene, July 4, 1969, and then rifling through the weeks, months and years — all of it scrupulously fact-checked. His work here speaks of the utmost concentration, patience and restraint. It is easily his most mature and coherent picture.
Shot in High Definition by DP Harris Savides (Elephant), Zodiac is both matter-of-fact and strangely elusive. For all that much of it takes place under fluorescent office lights, cutting between parallel investigations led by Inspectors Dave Toschi (Mark Ruffalo) and Bill Armstrong (Anthony Edwards) and crime beat reporter Paul Avery (an engagingly dissolute Robert Downey Jr), the prevailing mood is an altogether hazier, amber nocturne, the darkness on the edge of town — and the edge of reason too.
Zodiac is a fascinating procedural precisely because Fincher leaves room for doubt. He’s at least as interested in how not knowing drives and cripples these men as he is in establishing definitive guilt. In this, the film’s closest cousin is Bong Joon-ho’s brilliant Memories of Murder. The mystery is the point.
Jul 27: Intro by Kurtis Smejkal, film critic, Three Angry Nerds
More than any American movie of the past decade, Zodiac accepts and embraces irresolvability, which may be why it’s so hypnotically rewatchable.
Adam Nayman, The Ringer
A long work of completely sustained suspense and dark humor.
Wesley Morris, Boston Globe
David Fincher
Jake Gyllenhaal, Robert Downey Jr, Mark Ruffalo
USA
2007
English
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Credits
Screenwriter
James Vanderbilt
Cinematography
Harris Savides
Editor
Angus Wall
Original Music
David Shire
Production Design
Donald Graham Burt
Art Director
Keith P. Cunningham
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