Zodiac

Judged on the theatrical cut. The length is compelled by the subject, which is attrition: a case that eats twenty-two years must be felt to eat them, and the viewer pays out time as the men pay out careers. The subtractive test finds almost no slack. The abduction of Kathleen Johns looks like a detour and is required, since the case cannot even say which crimes are its own. Bob Vaughn’s basement, a dead end, is required for the same reason: the investigation is mostly dead ends. What gives: Graysmith’s marriage is stated in a few scenes rather than built, Melanie is there to object and leave, Avery’s decline is dropped rather than closed, and the late montage compresses what duration earned.

Score: 8.6 / 10

The disclosure can be stated, and it holds. The need to know is not a virtue that may go wrong but an appetite with its own cost, and the institutions built to know, police in four jurisdictions, a newspaper, handwriting experts, the courts, are made to fail exactly where certainty is wanted. The jurisdictions cannot share evidence; a handwriting match clears the likeliest man; a newspaper gives the killer the front page he asks for, and so makes him, whose real product is attention. Graysmith’s line, “I need to know who he is”, is the disease as well as the motive. What holds it from the top: knowing is a narrower field than the whole human condition, and the film leans toward its suspect more than its own method allows.

Score: 8.8 / 10

The elevation is dread, and it comes in a few great passages separated by long stretches of procedure, which counts against frequency. The summits: Lake Berryessa in full daylight, the hooded man walking down to the couple on the shore, played without score and without cutting away; the overhead shot that follows Paul Stine’s cab through the grid of the city before the killing; Kathleen Johns on the dark road with her child, the stranger’s courtesy turning; Graysmith in Vaughn’s basement, footsteps above him. Then the quiet summit at the end, Graysmith in a hardware store staring at Allen across the aisle while Allen looks back. The procedural middle is absorbing and flat by intent, and the last act’s elevation is all in one stare.

Score: 8.3 / 10

The myth is built. The archetype is the quest, the hunt for a monster, and each investigator takes it up as a knight would and is unhorsed by time: Avery by drink, Armstrong by leaving the case for his family, Toschi by an accusation over forged letters. Graysmith, the least armed, inherits it as the boy in the old tale does, and is refused the slaying. The monster names himself, a figure of the night sky with a crossed circle for a sign, and the film holds that myth at arm’s length as the killer’s own publicity, and sets beside it Dirty Harry, the cop who wins, which Toschi walks out of. What holds it at the gate: the construction is negative, a quest built to fail, and the particulars rarely carry archetypal weight of their own.

Score: 8.5 / 10

The inheritance was the serial-killer thriller at its commercial height, from The Silence of the Lambs (1991) to Fincher’s own Se7en (1995), which promises the viewer a mind to understand and a confrontation to end on. The turn denies both: no killer’s interiority, no climax, a newspaper and police procedural on the model of All the President’s Men (1976), and a last scene that is a line-up of photographs and an uncertain witness. The stake was real: a studio film of more than two and a half hours, with a cast of stars, that refused its genre’s reward, and a director who turned against his own Se7en. What holds it from the top is preparation: Pakula’s newsroom and Gordon Willis’s restraint, and above all Bong Joon-ho’s Memories of Murder (2003), which had already made the unsolved serial case a film about its investigators’ ruin.

Score: 8.6 / 10

Change the form and the film loses what it knows, which is what the pursuit of certainty costs in time. The form is accumulation: dated title cards, the decades passing in clothes and cars, a time-lapse of the Transamerica Pyramid rising, a lead handed from man to man as each is worn out. The film is built from documents, letters, ciphers, case files, handwriting exemplars, and its scenes are mostly people reading and comparing them, so that the viewer does the investigators’ work and arrives where they do. The violence is concentrated in the first hour and then withdrawn, so the long middle is felt as the case becoming paper. The closing line-up, a man pointing at a photograph twenty-two years late, is the form’s last word. The cost: the Graysmith third, compressed into montage, departs from the duration that is the form’s law.

Score: 9.0 / 10

Nineteen years of evidence, so in part a forecast, and the return is already rich. The film reads differently on each viewing: the first hour’s thriller gives way, on return, to the film about time and institutions it always was, and the background of newsroom, jurisdictions and filing yields more as the plot stops mattering. The open questions are real: whether the film is fair to Allen, whom it all but names while showing the evidence that cleared him; whether Graysmith is its hero or its last casualty; whether it criticises the obsession it makes its audience share. It has been read again in the light of the true-crime boom it anticipated. Against it: two decades are not the demonstration the axis prefers, and the questions cluster around one theme, knowledge and its cost.

Score: 8.5 / 10

Released in 2007, so force and reach are scored together, against the cinema of its decade. Intrinsic force: the film reorganised what an American studio film about a serial killer could be, from a duel to an epistemology, and showed that digital capture could carry a period film with the density and restraint of photochemical work. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: the long investigative procedural that followed on screen, Denis Villeneuve’s Prisoners (2013), the first season of True Detective (2014), Fincher’s own Mindhunter (2017 to 2019), and the true-crime boom in documentary and podcast after Serial (2014), which shares its figure of the amateur who cannot stop, though direct descent cannot be shown. The limits stand: the reach is diffuse, partly shared with Memories of Murder, and delayed influence is credited and discounted.

Score: 8.6 / 10

About nineteen years old, and survival can only be weighed on what nineteen years show. The form survives whole: the complete theatrical version is in circulation, and the director’s cut beside it neither repairs nor replaces it. Presence has grown since release rather than faded: the film circulates continuously on home video and streaming, is in steady critical use, and is now commonly named among the essential American films of its decade. That is presence among those who keep film, not the widest presence of a popular classic, and it earns no step above the usual figure. The surface is a period reconstruction, not a period surface, so it does not date with its own moment; the digital capture of 2007 is the one surface that could date, and it has not.

Score: 8.3 / 10

Read to the anchors of the elder arts. The making bears weight throughout. Harris Savides’s photography, low in contrast, sodium and fluorescent, makes the 1970s a lit world rather than a filtered one. Angus Wall’s cutting keeps scenes of men reading documents taut over two and a half hours. The reconstruction of San Francisco across two decades is large, much of it invisible. The sound gives the attacks no score and the passing years their radio. The ensemble is the strongest of Fincher’s work: Mark Ruffalo’s Toschi, all small gestures and fatigue; Robert Downey Jr.’s Avery, funny and then ruined; John Carroll Lynch’s Allen, genial, plausible and frightening at once. The costs: Jake Gyllenhaal’s Graysmith is a sketch beside them, the women are written as obstacles, and the late montage hurries.

Score: 8.8 / 10

Take the two most distant elements: the stabbing at Lake Berryessa, silent and in daylight, and the newsroom comedy of Avery’s riffs and the inspectors’ banter over animal crackers. One law governs both: knowledge arrives in fragments, out of context, and too late. The killing is seen whole by the camera and by no one who could use it; the jokes are men handling dread as information. The same law holds the call to Melvin Belli on live television, where the voice may not be the killer’s, and the closing line-up, where certainty arrives twenty-two years after it could matter. The range is wide, horror, comedy and a quiet domestic drama, and the law covers it. The strain: the Graysmith third gives way to a more ordinary amateur’s thriller, and the film leans toward Allen.

Score: 8.8 / 10

Several orders are held and joined by one line, the case. The law, in four jurisdictions that cannot pool their evidence; the press, which carries the killer and makes him; labour, in the careers the case consumes; the family, in Graysmith’s marriage and Armstrong’s choice of his family over the case; the city across two decades, its look and its fears; popular culture, which turns the case into Dirty Harry while it is still open. What holds it lowest is what lies outside. Interiority is withheld by design: the killer has none on screen and the investigators little. The sacred and the natural order are absent. The victims are seen only at the moment they become victims. The film encompasses a society’s apparatus of knowing more fully than its people.

Score: 7.8 / 10