Zodiac

A film set in California and built on a real case. In 1969 a couple are shot in a car. Soon afterwards letters begin arriving at the newspapers; the sender gives himself a name and sends ciphers. The paper prints the letter. A schoolteacher and his wife break the code. From there the film follows three people. A newspaper cartoonist, a newspaper reporter and a homicide detective. Robert becomes fixed on the puzzle and does not let it go for years. Paul starts drinking. Detective Toschi tries to move forward with the evidence he has and keeps running into jurisdictions. What the narrative is interested in is not the murders but obsession: the film is not after a killer, it is after what that killer did to three men's lives. The bureaucracy is inside the narrative. Handwriting samples travel between counties, files go missing, and a suspect cannot be questioned because of a state line. The film does not solve the case. It concentrates on one name and says nothing definite at the end; the real file has not been officially closed to this day. The scene in the basement is the tensest thing in it and contains no violence at all. It was shot on digital cameras and the director worked the scenes over a very large number of takes, something the actors often described afterwards. The killings were reconstructed in fidelity to the records; one attack was filmed at the real location. Jake Gyllenhaal, Mark Ruffalo, Robert Downey Jr., Anthony Edwards, Brian Cox and Chloë Sevigny are in the cast. David Fincher directed. Who it is for: anyone who likes slow, detailed, realistic crime narrative. Who it is not for: anyone expecting a solution; the film runs two and a half hours and deliberately ends without one.