Whenever a series of murders go unsolved and unpunished, there is an inherent drive and fascination to find the culprit because we want that person to be brought to justice. That drive is only further infuriating when the suspect takes it upon himself to delude the masses and set his own mystery almost as a challenge to the public. Jack the Ripper, of course, was the infamous, unapprehended killer that haunted Britain in the late 19th century and then there was the Zodiac killer in California in the 1960s and 1970s.
David Fincher’s Zodiac chronicles the real-life events of the latter case and focuses not so much on the serial killer himself but more on the paranoia and intrigue it instilled in the people who tried to solve the case. What made it more taunting and frustrating is that the Zodiac killer, in narcissistic fashion, sparked the fascination towards himself. He sent letters to the police and the San Francisco Chronicle, sending ciphers and encrypted letters and daring the investigators to crack his identity.
The film opens with a series of rather chilling and bloody killings at the hands of the Zodiac from 1969 to 1971. One would expect the director, David Fincher of Se7en, to push further with the gruesome factor but Fincher wisely chooses to be more tasteful in depicting these real-life murders that spanned across different counties throughout the state of California. The acts are cold and merciless but the camera does not linger there.
From that point on, Zodiac turns into a straightforward police procedural that spans several decades and one of the most impressive qualities of the screenplay by James Vanderbilt, who adapted from Robert Graysmith’s original novel, is its narrative clarity. There is a labyrinth of clues that the detectives and reporters follow all throughout the film’s 160-minute runtime and we are never confused as to how the characters arrive at their conclusions and theories throughout the investigation. And though the story does provide its own theory of its prime suspect, it does not make the blunder that the Jack the Ripper film, From Hell, made in providing a pat resolution that gave the illusion that the killer was actually fingered.
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