The brutal murder that opens David Fincher's new thriller Zodiac sets the tone for a film that is an exhausting experience, owing to its mammoth length, extreme tension and fine detail. It deals with the events surrounding the Zodiac, a serial killer who operated around California in the late '60's and 1970's and was never caught. This is clearly not new territory from the director of Seven, and several moments create a similarly stomach-turning sense of threat. Yet with its basis in true events, Fincher's realism is slightly removed from the macabre. Indeed as the police are dogged by communication problems across county borders in an era before mobiles and frustrated by inconclusive details of fingerprint and handwriting evidence the film conveys not inspired detective work but a painstaking inquiry going nowhere and eroding the lives of those involved. The film roughly divides between the police investigation and the obsessive private investigations of Robert Graysmith (Jake Gyllenhaal), whose relentless pursuit of the Zodiac leads his family to desert him amidst a pile of files and scrapbooks. This division has its flaws. We are not given enough information on Graysmith's background in the first half to understand his interest, so that his switch from geeky cartoonist solving ciphers to sheer obsessive hunting for evidence in dark basements is too sudden. However, this is a thoughtful film. Perhaps too obviously self-referential in showing how the case inspired the Scorpio killer in Dirty Harry, Zodiac nevertheless questions the purpose of converting real life suffering into filmic entertainment. Fincher's response avoids stylising the events, sticking to the gritty complexities of the investigations and the chilling arbitrariness of the murders. The result is hardly "entertainment" but a film that requires close attention and steely nerves to negotiate the details of a disturbing story.
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