As much as I love films that are based on true stories, the ones involving serial killers are usually a bit too scary for my tastes, so I tend to avoid those. That’s why I never saw the David Fincher film Zodiac when it was playing in theaters earlier this year. I didn’t want to end up getting nightmares for several weeks because of the contents of the movie, so I steadfastly avoided it.
But I kept hearing and reading so many positive reviews that I simply couldn’t avoid it forever. Plus, I heard that the body count isn’t as high as you might expect from a film like this, and the focus is more or less on the investigation than on the killer, so I figured I’d go ahead and give it a try despite my initial fears. It turns out I made a good decision.
Plot summary (with possible spoilers): Back in the late 1960s and early 1970s, a serial killer who called himself “Zodiac” was going around California killing random victims. The film starts in 1969, and shows Zodiac attacking two young people at a Lover’s Lane parking area in Vallejo. The woman died in the attack, but the man survived, and is believed to have seen the killer’s face. However, he’s so spooked by the event that he doesn’t cooperate with police in trying to identify the killer.
Later on, the killer sends a letter and cipher to three major California newspapers, including the San Francisco Chronicle. He demands that his letter be published, and threatens to kill again if the papers don’t comply. The Chronicle crime beat reporter is a man named Paul Avery (played by Robert Downey, Jr.), but he blows the letters off as the work of a crackpot. Nevertheless, the paper’s editor decides to go ahead and follow Zodiac’s request.
This will become Zodiac’s pattern, with the letters and ciphers alternating with long periods of silence and a few more bodies along the way. Of course, he attracts the attention of the police, led by detectives William Armstrong (Anthony Edwards) and Dave Toschi (Mark Ruffalo).
Unfortunately, their investigation doesn’t get very far. The few leads they do get end up pointing to a man named Arthur Leigh Allen (John Carroll Lynch), who soon emerges as the primary suspect. But all the evidence is highly circumstantial, and their best chance at arresting Allen falls apart when the police department’s handwriting expert says that Allen’s writing is not a match to the Zodiac letters.
The investigation wanes over the years, but Robert Graysmith (Jake Gyllenhaal), a political cartoonist at the Chronicle, won’t let it die out. At first, he buddies up with Avery to get the inside scoop on the letters Zodiac sent to the paper. Then, he gets Toschi to let him look through official police files, and starts putting together his own version of what happened. Graysmith successfully connects a lot of dots and he too ends up liking Allen as the killer. But still, there’s simply not enough evidence to bring Allen in.
The film ends with Graysmith working up the courage to face down Allen at the hardware store where he works. No words are exchanged; they just stare into each other’s eyes. It’s clear that Graysmith knows all about Allen, and there’s a moment when it looks like Allen realizes he’s been made. Through title cards, we learn that Allen was never arrested or charged, but in 1991, the male survivor from the 1969 Vallejo attack positively identifies Allen as the perpetrator. However, Allen suffers a fatal heart attack before police get to him.
My Reaction: I went into this film not knowing anything about the real Zodiac killings or any of the investigative work surrounding the case. That being said, it was still easy for me to get drawn into the whole mess, which is a testament to the strength of the screenplay and the actors involved in this film.
One of the few criticisms I’ve read about Zodiac is that “nothing happens” in the movie. That’s understandable, to a point, but I thought Fincher did a tremendous job of capturing the frustration of Toschi and Graysmith as they got so close to Allen but could never quite obtain that one piece of evidence that would put the man away.
For a film where “nothing happens,” I sure was on the edge of my seat almost the entire time and couldn’t wait to see where the investigation would lead next. I ordinarily can’t stand movies that last more than two hours, but I had no problem with the 160-minute running time of Zodiac.
As I said, I didn’t know that the Zodiac killer was never caught, so several of the scenes involving Toschi and Allen, and that final scene between Graysmith and Allen, were very suspenseful for me. I couldn’t believe how fast my heart was pounding when Graysmith just stood there looking at Allen! I usually don’t react this way to films, so again, I have to credit Fincher and the actors here.
Overall, I was as strangely fascinated with this case as Graysmith was, and I can totally understand how the investigation might have consumed his whole life like that. I thought Zodiac was an exceptional film, and I give it 8.0 stars out of 10.