Zodiac (2007)
Crime | Drama | Thriller

Based on the true story of the notorious serial killer and the intense manhunt he inspired, Zodiac is a superbly crafted thriller from the director of Se7en and Panic Room. Featuring an outstanding ensemble cast led by Jake Gyllenhaal, Robert Downey Jr., Mark Ruffalo and Chloe Sevigny, Zodiac is a searing and singularly haunting examination of twin obsessions: one man's desire to kill and another's quest for the truth.

"Zodiac" may frustrate viewers who come to David Fincher's latest film expecting a traditional serial killer thriller. The film begins with a couple of hair-raising and rather brutal recreations of murders carried out by the mysterious killer who terrorized the San Francisco Bay area in the late 1960s and early 1970s. These early scenes are shocking and, compared to the rest of the film, disorienting, because they offer the only time that we come close to seeing events from the killer's perspective. As the film progresses, the Zodiac killer himself fades into the background, and the movie turns into a meticulous and engrossing document of the investigation to track him down, an investigation that includes countless blind alleys and false clues and which to this day has not reached a conclusion. I would be more prone to label the somewhat rambling screenplay as sloppy storytelling if I did not feel that Fincher tells the story exactly as he wants to. The elusive narrative works, because the film is about an elusive villain.


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