MikePadgett.com

Zodiac

• Director: David Fincher
• United States, 2007
• 

The identity of the perpetrator of five serial murders claimed by the so-called “Zodiac” killer remains a mystery. Inevitably the case has preoccupied the popular media, most famously in the analogy drawn by the “Scorpio” plotline in Dirty Harry. Newspaper cartoonist turned super sleuth Robert Graysmith documents the real-life hunt for Zodiac in his book, upon which Fincher’s weighty film is based.

This is David Fincher’s first feature since 2002’s flimsy Panic Room and he admits to having become as obsessed with the case as Graysmith. In the sustained intensity of the film, almost devoid of the director’s usual action and wrongfoot plotting, there’s ample evidence of that fact. A near-unbelievable volume of research went into the project, producing James Vanderbilt’s commendably sharp script and a unique visual aesthetic. Fincher is in this one up to his neck and though he sometimes struggles to bring together the vast array of factual data with the demands of melodrama and character development, the result is largely successful.

Zodiac is overlong and slightly overambitious. Jake Gyllenhaal tries hard to conjure nuance and depth out of a rather uninvolving portrayal of Graysmith. Elsewhere there are some superb acting performances, notably from Robert Downey Jr – perfectly cast as a drunk and dissolute hack – and a tour-de-force of understated resonance from Mark Ruffalo as the harried detective Toschi.