In the 60s, 70s and 80s, we in Northern California suffered more than our share of serial killers, to the point that I couldn’t even remember the Golden State Killer, recently snagged by a much ballyhooed foray into ancestry DNA. But the list topper has to be the Zodiac Killer, a random thrill killer who used the news media to taunt the police and terrify the Bay Area.
Officially, this case has never been solved. But there’s a pretty convincing theory about the killer’s identity advanced in David Fincher’s 2007 Zodiac.
Fincher spins his story through the separate obsessions of three Zodiac-hunters. There’s the dogged homicide detective (Mark Ruffalo) and the renegade newspaper reporter (Robert Downey, Jr.). Then there’s the oddball, a newspaper cartoonist (Jake Gyllenhaal); unlike the other two, it’s not his job to track down the killer. He’s a puzzle hobbyist who takes on the killer’s cryptogram and then plunges down the rabbit holes of matching handwriting and the availability of various suspects.
Ruffalo, Gyllenhaal and Downey are all superb. And John Carroll Lynch takes the creep-o-meter off the scale as the prime suspect.
The supporting cast is brilliant and unusually deep, including Chloe Sevigne, Elias Koteas, Clea DuVall, Donal Logue, Philip Baker Hall, James Le Gros and an unrecognizable Candy Clark. Brian Cox nails the bluster and wit of that prototypical celebrity attorney, Melvin Belli.
Fincher, of course, is the master of the serial killer movie. Before Zodiac, he made what is probably still the most thrilling serial killer movie, Se7en. He followed Zodiac with the top-notch The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo and Gone Girl. In Zodiac, Fincher builds the tension, occasionally giving the audience relief with some laughs, especially when Gyllenhaal’s amateur sleuth finds himself in a situation that he thinks is much more dangerous than it really is.
The film is also a dead-on time capsule of the 70s in the San Francisco Bay Area, from the opening shot, a drive through a Vallejo neighborhood on the 4th of July. The fashions and the music of the period are perfect, especially the Donovan and Santana songs. This was before law enforcement had DNA to work with – and, in the case of two of the investigating police departments, even a newfangled fax machine. As the 70s approach the 80s, we even see an early Pong video game. One thing that I did not personally remember from the era, but have verified really did exist, is the Aqua Velva cocktail.
This is a wonderfully entertaining movie. Zodiac can be streamed from Amazon (included with Prime), iTunes, Vudu, YouTube and Google Play.