I am not the Zodiac.

Rating: 9/10 (10 November 2015)

The basement scene is the most talked about of the entire film, and rightfully. At first viewing I was entranced, and yet a little disappointed when it eventuated for nothing, because then it feels like a cheap way to drum up tension for the sake of it. But as I revisited it it made more sense - the overarching theme of Zodiac is not about the killer so much as it is about Graysmith losing his mind over the case, and here he is creating his own red herring out of his paranoia and fears. Which creates a few other problems. It is a fine scene of course; like the lake stabbings, there is zero non-diegetic sound so the tension is carried predominately by Gyllenhaal's heavy breathing and the sinister whistle of the kettle upstairs, suggesting an accomplice. Upon re-watching it is almost too cinematic to be true compared to the rest of the film; when the supposed Zodiac pulls the string to drown out the only light-bulb and usher in complete darkness, it veers into something a script would stress and a movie be built around. But it works. The problem is that is creates an entirely new subplot where Graysmith's mind goes and this is not entirely justified. We have to be told that his marriage is collapsing, that the shallow relationship with Sevigny is at it's breaking point. Gyllenhaal's performance is very straight forward.
This is an entirely minor issue because Zodiac is by all means fantastic. Fincher heavily leans on the reality of the Zodiac case, consulting at length with real life victims, police files and other sources in order to capture exactly how it happened. This isn't seductive or decadent or grimy like Se7en; there are no crisp shallow focus guns pointing right at us within a rainy back alley. There is no high speed chase through the crumbling buildings. The soundtrack is period accurate and ushers in the passing of time, yet the most potent moments are without that backing track. The aforementioned basement scene, and of course the stabbings at the lake. Fincher shot on the exact same day and made sure of every detail in his replica, although the grass and trees are withered yellow (like so many of the other scenes that are applied a tint) as the masked man slithers into view, and death and decay races through my mind. There is nothing to mask the brutal sounds of knife entering skin again and again. A story about Mila Pfefferberg, a Holocaust survivor shivering at the sigh of Ralph Fiennes as Amon Goeth comes to mind. I am sure that Bryan Hartnell feels the same way when he watches this scene.
It is predominately shot on digital, but looks every bit from the late 60s. As a man in a yellow-cab taxi is killed, a guitar riff strikes in as the Zodiac killer stalks away. There is a great series of scenes, cross-cut, where numerous police departments attempt to find headway on the case but run into several technical difficulties and barriers that would be unheard of today. We are immersed from the get-go. A camera is placed atop a letter trolley, and we visit every room in the aged yellow newspaper offices accompanied by a Santana psychedelic instrumental made famous at the 1969 Woodstock. Marvin Gaye's soulful Inner City Blues serenades a period of years as the Transamerica is constructed. Montages are plentiful; flurries of inserts as Graysmith photographs the puzzle for his own memento, extreme close-ups that rapidly scan case files that are then chucked into an irrelevant pile, superimposed newspaper titles and TV broadcasts indicating that time has passed, but the Zodiac is still at large, and Graysmith's frustration grows. A cartoonist makes it his lifelong purpose, while Avery (playing impeccably by Downey Jr.) sees the scoop in it, drumming up publicity and questioning the killer's sexuality. A third investigator, Ruffalo's Toschi, is also consumed, although even he does not pursue it as diligently as our main character.
Fincher goes a step further by focusing on one suspect, Arthur Leigh Allen. He breaks his supposed objectiveness in his shooting in one interrogation scene as three detectives visit Allen at work. We observe impartially at first, as they go through the usual pleasantries and questions, until Allen makes the mistake of crossing his legs, and we get a low angle shot that distinctly highlights the size of the boots and the detective's brief glance of this. At the mention of bloody knives (oh so perfectly casual from Lynch), the shot-reverse-shot becomes scarily intimate, and from Allen's POV the detectives are suddenly intrigued, staring right down his eyes, and when we cut, they are not looking at Allen, but at a close-up of the Zodiac watch he absent-mindedly thumbs. And in the penultimate scene, a tense climatic confrontation that in another film would be an action chase sequence, Allen stares down Graysmith, knowing what he knows, but also taking comfort in the fact that he cannot do anything about it. This film is more about a cartoonist's obsession with a serial killer than the serial killer himself, but it is nevertheless exciting. There is occasional indulgence from Fincher (think the bird's eye tracking of the taxi) but all in all it is not so hard to be lured in much like Graysmith becomes lured by the Zodiac killer.