Hyper-reductive plot summary: Time passes quickly, but obsessions last forever.
Zodiac is currently streaming on Netflix.
Zodiac (2007) is one of the best films of the 21st century. I’m not the first, or ten thousandth, person to make this claim. David Fincher’s film about the serial killer who shook the Bay Area for two decades is a favorite among film critics (as are many of Fincher’s films, including his other masterpieces The Social Network and Se7en).
It’s pretty easy to see why. It is beautifully shot (although tonally falling into that greys and browns spectrum that is Fincher’s signature style). The cast is incredible (including Jake Gyllenhaal, Robert Downey Jr., Mark Ruffalo, and supporting roles for John Carroll Lynch, Elias Koteas, Chloe Sevigny, Donal Logue, June Diane Raphael, Brian Cox, John Getz, and many others), with Gyllenhaal in particular really selling his gradual descent into obsession and paranoia. I was reminded of John Travolta’s very memorable performance in Blow Out, but where De Palma went for spectacle in that, Fincher here moves at a languid pace. And above all, the story pulls you in and doesn’t let up.
If you haven’t seen the film, your first impulse on hearing “police and journalists chase the Zodiac Killer” might be that the movie is a slasher film. This is not the case. There are some very tense scenes of Zodiac attacks, but they are only in the first hour of the film. As he retreats from the public eye and the newspapers stop humoring his requests for his letters to be published, the movie shifts to the chase. And the chase is pure procedural, with countless scenes spent in archives and on phones. But time keeps moving on: by the end of the 1970s, the public doesn’t want to think about the Zodiac any more, the police have countless other crimes to pursue, the newspapers have Vietnam and Watergate and other massive events.
That doesn’t mean, though, that the compulsion to catch the Zodiac lessens for everyone. Robert Graysmith (Gyllenhaal) keeps following the clues even as everyone else retires, gets burned out, or moves on. And he keeps pulling at the threads, and pulling at the threads, regardless of its effect on his reputation and family. This eventually leads to the scariest scene in the movie, which I will leave to the viewer to enjoy. You’ll know it when it happens.
There really is a Robert Graysmith, and he really did write a massive book on the Zodiac. Many of the other characters are based on real-life people (and the anecdote about Mark Ruffalo’s detective being the basis for the main character in Bullitt is also true). John Carroll Lynch’s Arthur Leigh Allen really did, up to his death a few years ago, seem the likely suspect.
I’ve said on Twitter that my three most-watched movies of the past decade are Mad Max: Fury Road, Stop Making Sense, and Zodiac (three stone-cold classics that are eminently rewatchable). I don’t think another film comes close. I’ve watched Zodiac three times in 2020, and as I finish writing this, I’m tempted to watch it again.
An extremely large percentage of TV, movies, and podcasts are true crime or procedurals. My humble suggestion is that, if you’re into the SVUs and CSIs and My Favorite Murders of the world, give Zodiac a try. The good guys don’t win in the end, but it is nonetheless one hell of a journey.