David Fincher was seven years old and living in the Bay Area of San Francisco in 1969, when the Zodiac killer cast his deadly shadow across the neighbourhood. This personal connection to that time (when the first serial killer since Jack the Ripper to make use of – even exploit – the press sent letters and coded messages to the papers, phoned into chatshows to utter dire threats, and left the bodies of the innocent riddled with his bullets and butchery) is crucial to the film’s impact. Researched from 10,000 pages of police transcripts, interviews with those involved in the investigation, survivors and relatives of the victims, and the books of Robert Graysmith, Zodiac brings into intense relief all the things that other serial killer movies do not.
It centres on three men: San Francisco Chronicle crime reporter Paul Avery (Robert Downey Jr), to whom the Zodiac killer sends his code; SFPD homicide detective Dave Toschi (Mark Ruffalo) who must investigate; and Graysmith himself (Jake Gyllenhaal), the Chronicle’s cartoonist, who has his own unique take on the killer. All three become obsessed by the search for this manipulative modern bogey man.
Always a master of the understated palette and uneasy listening soundtrack, Fincher brings the dread miasma of the era alive, letting his three leads absorb their characters utterly while committing to celluloid the most genuinely terrifying representation of the banality of evil in Zodiac’s ruthless attacks. Ruffalo evokes all the frustration of a brilliant detective stymied by the rules, coming devastatingly close to catching his man, only to see him slip away on a technicality. He is further taunted by the filmic representation of his quarry when Dirty Harry is released, in a scene which underlines the vast gulf between reality and the glamorisation of the serial killer as cult anti-hero. Downey Jr captures the tormented, drug-fuelled Avery’s downwards spiral to louche perfection, while Gyllenhaal is compulsive as Graysmith, a man called ‘Retard’ by the Chronicle’s staff. Whether he has a touch of Asperger’s or not, the cartoonist’s ability to think laterally surpasses everyone else’s, and eventually leads him to his goal: to look the killer in the eye and know that he has his man.
Zodiac has all the gravitas of a great novel, and an important point to make: a serial killer is not an amusing charmer like Hannibal Lecter, but an utterly mundane son of a bitch whose actions destroy scores of lives and leave wounds that never heal.
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