A procedural so patient it becomes existential. Fincher's quiet masterpiece, and the best film about the press ever shot in colour.
1969, San Francisco. A cab driver is shot for $5. Letters arrive at the Chronicle from a man calling himself Zodiac, claiming responsibility and threatening more. Reporter Paul Avery (Robert Downey Jr.) covers the case. Crime editor Robert Graysmith (Jake Gyllenhaal), a political cartoonist with no investigative experience, becomes obsessed. SFPD detective Dave Toschi (Mark Ruffalo) works the case for years.
The film follows these three men, with the audience embedded in their cubicles, their archives, their basement interviews, and their slow professional erosion. The case is never closed.
Most serial-killer films deliver, eventually, the moment the killer is caught or identified. Zodiac refuses this. The Zodiac killer was never charged and the case remains officially unsolved. The film commits, structurally and morally, to that absence. The investigation continues for 1971, 1974, 1978, 1983 — onscreen title cards mark the years — and the further the film goes, the more you understand what living inside an unresolved obsession does to a person.
It's a procedural shot at the scale of an epic. 157 minutes. Fincher pushed Paramount for the cut he wanted.
Halfway through the third act, Graysmith goes alone to a man's house. The man may or may not be the killer. The man invites him into the basement to see a movie poster. The scene runs about four minutes. There is no music. There is no escalation. There is no violence. There is only the slow, dread-rising recognition that Graysmith has put himself in a place from which he may not return.
It is one of the great suspense sequences of the 21st century. Almost everything in it is implication. Fincher and DP Harris Savides shoot it in available basement light. It works because the film has spent two hours making you understand how careful you'd have to be, and then watches a man not be careful.
Zodiac is also the best film ever made about the daily-newspaper newsroom of the 1970s. Fincher pulls accurate Chronicle masthead replicas, working pneumatic tube systems, real reporters' desks. He shot in the Chronicle's actual building. The film captures something specific and now-vanished: the period when an American metropolitan daily had the budget, the time, and the cultural standing to pursue a story for a decade.
The film's view of the press is unsentimental — competitive, sometimes ugly — but the work itself is treated with absolute seriousness.