SYNOPSIS
In real life the Zodiac Killer terrorised San Francisco in the late 1960s and early 70s, his murders supported by a publicity hungry correspondence with the city's newspapers. He was the inspiration for Dirty Harry's Scorpio Killer, yet in Se7en director David Fincher's intricate drama his crimes are given a less sensational spin. Focusing on the police and press investigation into the murders, Fincher's film follows cartoonist Robert Graysmith (Jake Gyllenhaal), flamboyant reporter Paul Avery (Robert Downey Jr) and grizzled police inspector David Toschi (Mark Ruffalo) as they try to crack the case. It's over two-and-a-half hours of obsessively gritty procedure that really finds the drama in the details. Exhaustive in its dedication to the minutiae of the unsolved killings (Fincher combed through 10,000 pages of documents and interviewed survivors), Zodiac probes the limits of knowledge and evidence with startling power. And, refreshingly, Fincher allows the murders (re-created with disturbing brutality) to take second place to tracing the toll the investigation takes on the protagonists.
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