Certificate 15, 158mins

Despite what Hollywood would tell you to the contrary, there’s nothing neat and clear-cut about most serial killer cases. Justice is not meted out at the end of 100 minutes in a hail of cathartic gun-fire. In the real world, cases drag on through entire decades without a successful conviction. And Hollywood has, until now, been largely silent on the other victims of the serial killer: the men and women left as worn-out husks by the years spent trying to solve a case that eludes them. Which is one of the reasons why David Fincher’s Zodiac is such a revelation.

Zodiac was the name claimed by a real-life serial killer who taunted the San Francisco area with coded clues and threats sent to local newspapers. He was never caught. The killer’s identity is a black space at the centre of the story, so the focus of the movie is on the men who tried to catch him.

BACKGROUND

• Zodiac

• Zodiac - Sunday Times review

• The world of a serial killer

• The killers who conquered cinema

• The murderer I grew up with

A deadly obsession

Who was Zodiac? Robert Graysmith believes he knows, he tells Martyn Palmer

Related Internet Links

• 2007 London Film Festival coverage

• Times Online Film Trailers

The film explodes into life in the late 1960s in a rain of fireworks and optimism; it covers the 1970s, a decade shot in shades of nicotine and bourbon; finally, it hauls itself into the early 1980s, half-crippled by the effort. Zodiac is about the kind of all-consuming obsession that leaves a man at best older and wiser and, at worst, broken.

In the past a showy director with a slightly baroque weakness for overdoing it on the atmosphere, here Fincher reins in his tendency for flashy camerawork and moody interiors. The level of research is evident in every shot, the detail almost overwhelming. The atmosphere of the newsroom at the San Francisco Chronicle is evoked particularly brilliantly. It reeks of cheap coffee and clashing egos, sweat and sarcasm.

The Chronicle is the work-place of two of the main characters. Star reporter Paul Avery (Robert Downey Jr) is entertainingly arrogant and frequently drunk. He sees in the Zodiac case the potential for the scoop of his career. Robert Graysmith (Jake Gyllenhaal) is the cartoonist whose position on the newspaper food chain is way below that of even the irascible doughnut vendor. But it is his nerdish enthusiasm for puzzles that gives him an unusual insight into the Zodiac case, sparking an unhealthy fascination that causes the breakdown of his marriage and which led to the book on which the film is based.

The other two men whose lives are dominated by the Zodiac are the detectives Dave Toschi (Mark Ruffalo) and William Armstrong (Anthony Edwards). It’s a first-rate cast although, as Brokeback Mountain demonstrated, Gyllenhaal’s boyish looks are difficult to age convincingly.

The problem with the film is that as the killer’s trail goes cold, and lead after lead fizzles out, both the investigation and the film start to lose a sense of purpose. And the audience, accustomed to loose ends neatly tied, is expected to settle for more questions than answers. This may be the reason the film performed poorly at the American box office, but it is to be hoped that Fincher’s most mature work to date will earn respect over time.

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