Zodiac Review

Fincher shot this digitally at a time when almost nobody was, and Harris Savides uses that flat low-noise image to make 1970s San Francisco look like documentary evidence rather than period pastiche. The reconstruction is the point: scenes were reshot exhaustively to match witness statements, and the film is assembled from case files, handwriting analysis and jurisdictional squabbles rather than suspense beats. That is also why it frustrates.

After the lakeside attack, staged in daylight with terrible calm, the film abandons the killer almost entirely and becomes a story about three men losing years to an unsolvable problem. Jake Gyllenhaal's Graysmith is written as pure fixation, which limits him, while Robert Downey Jr's Avery is the more interesting decay and Mark Ruffalo's Toschi grounds the middle. Two and a half hours of ledgers and dead ends is a genuine test of patience, and aside from one basement sequence the tension is intellectual rather than visceral. Admirable, meticulous and unsatisfying by deliberate design.