David Fincher’s films frequently display a fascination with cracking clues and deciphering codes. It was there in Se7en’s use of biblical commandments, and in the domestic puzzle that was Panic Room. Throughout Fight Club, Fincher teased us with clues about the secret identity of his protagonist, Tyler Durden. And with his latest work, he has created his longest, most complex and infuriating conundrum yet: who was Zodiac?

This is the true story of a mysterious serial killer who called himself Zodiac in his letters to the media, and terrorised the people of San Francisco in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Before you cry out “Not another serial-killer film”, I should point out that this is not just another slash’n’mash number. For starters, we get none of that fascination with the killer, or the shock tactics of using gore for dramatic impact – this is not murder as entertainment.

In one of his numerous letters to the media, Zodiac writes, “I’m waiting for a good movie about me.” Fincher’s film is definitely a “good movie”, but the killer is a bit player in it. He’s there in his phone-call confessions to the police and the letters he writes to newspapers, but he never appears on screen. He has the rare distinction of being famous yet totally unknown. Fincher and his screenwriter, James Vanderbilt, are more interested in cracking the killer’s ciphers than in unravelling his motivation. Their film is a journey to the past, before cops talked like shrinks and went in for psychological profiling. Not once does anyone involved in the case discuss the killer’s motivation. The dramatic focus is, instead, on the trio who pursue him and the price they paid for their obsession with finding him.

The most obsessed of the three is Robert Graysmith (Jake Gyllenhaal), a cartoonist at the San Francisco Chronicle, whose life, even after he marries Melanie (Chloë Sevigny) and has two children, is taken over by the case. He becomes an amateur sleuth with nothing but a passion for puzzles and justice on his side. Graysmith is a total outsider – in relation both to the straight, nononsense newspapermen he works with and to the excesses of San Francisco’s counterculture. He doesn’t drink or smoke. In an age of rampant hedonism, Graysmith is that most unappreciated of creatures, the heroic square. Gyllenhaal brings an authentic intensity to the role that perfectly evokes the idealism of the crusader and the obsessiveness of the crazy.

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 Zodiac case brings Graysmith into a kind of partnership with his paper’s flamboyant, hard-drinking chief crime reporter, Paul Avery, played with great panache by Robert Downey Jr. They are an odd but intriguing couple: Avery the boozy beatnik and Graysmith the grown-up boy scout. Also working the case are two detectives, Inspector David Toschi (Mark Ruffalo) and his partner, Inspector William Armstrong (Anthony Edwards). Toschi, with his passion for Animal Crackers (a popular American biscuit), his bow ties and his crumpled Colombo-esque mac, seems to have staggered out of a tele-vision cop show from the 1970s. The pleasure of the film is in watching these flawed men in action, trying to establish facts that keep turning into fiction; we get the clash of egos and the collapse of relationships. This is a touching study in failure.

Then there is us, the audience. Fincher manages to suck us into their obsession, leading us down false trails and promising leads.

The film begins with the shootings of Darlene Ferrin and Mike Mageau as they sit in their car in a deserted parking lot. A black car suddenly appears, and pulls up behind them; the engine sounds like a heavy breather. It takes off. Phew, you think – then you hear the furious screech of the black car’s tyres as it turns around. It’s the sound of a killer changing his mind. Watch this scene carefully for a glimpse of the killer’s face. It will come in handy when we finally meet the film’s main suspect, Arthur Leigh Allen (John Carroll Lynch). Is this our man?

Zodiac manages to hold our attention for more than two and a half hours with its dense and demanding screenplay. For a Fincher film, it shows a great deal of restraint. There are no wild displays of imagination; it’s not his usual flashy style. And it’s not a work of high drama. It revels in the humdrum tedium of detective work. Yet, so appealing are its characters, and the performances of the cast, they give the film a power to suck us into its obsessions, so we become participants in a riveting jigsaw puzzle where we lay down what must be the final piece, only to find it refuses to fit.

Zodiac 15, 157 mins

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