In the hands of David Fincher, the director responsible for Se7en and Fight Club, a movie about America’s most mysterious and brutal murderer was destined to be a feast for the peepers and provide food for thought.
While this thriller serves up both, Fincher dispenses with his camera trickery and plays it straight. This may be due to the story not being a work of fiction, but instead an adaptation of Robert Graysmith’s bestselling book, which recounts how the self-named ‘Zodiac’ killer held San Francisco in a grip of terror for several decades. Murdering without motive, the sick fuck then taunted authorities with weird ciphers and letters. At its core, the plot focuses less on the killings and more on the (living) individuals whose lives were torn apart by Zodiac’s activities – in particular, Graysmith (Jake Gyllenhaal), who was a cartoonist at the San Francisco Chronicle, and his cynical reporter colleague Paul Avery (Robert Downey Jr).
Zodiac is a suspense-spiked, absorbing watch, but the lack of sufficiently dramatic real-life events in the second half of the plot results in a suppositious payoff, and in Fincher compensating by occasionally overdramatising the facts.
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