This 2007 David Fincher Thriller Is Still One of the Greatest True Crime Movies Ever Made

How do you make a film about a true story with no ending? That's the narrative challenge present in any movie about the infamous Zodiac killer, who terrorized California's Bay Area in the 1960s and '70s. There are seemingly two ways out of that challenge: You can either simply leave the loose ends dangling, or draw your own conclusions. Or, if you're Zodiac (now streaming on Peacock), you can do both.

Released in 2007 and based on Robert Graysmith's book of the same name, David Fincher's Zodiac stands nearly 20 years as one of the filmmaker's finest efforts, a chilling and masterfully executed period drama with a faceless monster at its center. Fincher's legendary attention to detail is on full display in this film, transporting us all back to the San Francisco of the 1970s with uncommon power, and the film's recreations of the Zodiac's crimes are truly terrifying. But there's more to Zodiac than re-enactments and expertly assembled period details. In Fincher's hands, the film becomes not just a great true crime document, but an astonishing portrait of obsession and the ripple effects of violence, making it the best true crime movie ever made.

Zodiac's Atmosphere of True Terror

With the possible exception of Jack the Ripper, the Zodiac Killer ranks as the most iconic of unidentified serial murderers, in part because he himself cultivated an image in the press through ciphers, phone calls, and in one unforgettable case, an all-black killing suit described by one of his would-be victims. Anyone with a passing interested in true crime knows the name, the symbols, and the dark aura of the character this murderer created in the public eye. It's so pervasive that you barely have to do anything at all to conjure it, and for proof, Zodiac's first murder sequence presents the killer at a remove, letting our imagination do quite a bit of the work. 

But Zodiac wants to dig deeper than our imaginings of its killer and his dark deeds. The opening death scene, just like other key death scenes in the movie, are shot with an eye toward digging deep into the experience of the victims. We don't watch from a distance, or get mere glimpses as we might in a true crime documentary. We're put right there in the car, by the lake, on the streets of San Francisco, and we understand that these are regular people whose lives are suddenly and often awkwardly disrupted in terrifying ways. 

Nowhere is this more apparent than when Fincher shoots one of the most terrifying sequences in 21st Century film so far: the Zodiac's attack on a couple at Lake Berryessa while they're relaxing on a hillside. This is the scene in which the killer's legendary black hood comes into play, and while that image is striking, what really stays with you about the scene is the clear depiction of the Zodiac not as a superhuman specter of unimaginable menace, but as a guy who's just decided to do this kind of harm. There's a workaday feel to the way he goes about his business, an abruptness that makes it all the more shocking, and that understanding of the Zodiac as a man who's made a choice to do these awful things is a vital piece of the filmmaking puzzle as Zodiac digs deeper into the mystery of why, and who.

The Unsolvable Puzzle at the Heart of Zodiac

Most of Zodiac unfolds from the perspective of Robert Graysmith (Jake Gyllenhaal), a cartoonist at the San Francisco Chronicle with an affinity for puzzles, who soon develops a fascination with the Zodiac as he sends coded messages to the paper. Graysmith's not a crime reporter, or an investigator, or really someone anywhere close to those things, but the code draws him in. He sees something fascinating in the symbols laid out by the Zodiac, and before long he's itching to get involved, working on the paper's crime reporter Paul Avery (Robert Downey Jr.) for any hint of new information. 

Graysmith's keen sense of puzzle-solving and his hunger for any new details about the Zodiac persist throughout the film, as he digs deeper into the mystery and examines every twist as a new piece of the code, a new symbol that must be unraveled, to fit into the larger picture. What starts as a kind of dark hobby, an endorphin-spiking quest to make progress on something that's caught his eyes, soon develops into a full-blown obsession, consuming years of Graysmith's life as he closes in on his own preferred suspect, a man named Arthur Leigh Allen (John Carroll Lynch). 

As we follow Graysmith, we see how his obsession impacts his family, how it leads to a strained relationship with San Francisco Police Department inspector Dave Toschi (Mark Ruffalo), and how the puzzles of the Zodiac's existence create new codes, new mazes in his entire life. It's here that Zodiac becomes particularly effective not just as a true crime drama, but as a piece of true crime commentary. Any true crime buff knows that feeling of latching on to a particularly insidious, complex case, that sense that every answer leads to 20 more questions, that feeling of being lost in the details that's both confounding an exhilarating. In the case of Zodiac, those details run so deep that even when Graysmith thinks he's solved the case, he can't quite decipher the entire code. It's an unsolvable puzzle, and that makes it both fascinating and devastating.

The Crimes Left Unspoken

All of these elements are laid out in a very precise, true-to-life way, in keeping with Fincher's filmmaking style. It's a style that has, on occasion, leant itself to the view that Fincher is a cold filmmaker, that his obsessions and his drive leave emotional weight on the cutting room floor. Zodiac, for all its detail and precision, refutes that idea, because it's not just about the crimes we see. It's about the crimes we never talk about.

We are fascinated by the Zodiac Killer, whoever he was and wherever he may be now. As with numerous other murderers and fiends throughout history, we get lost in the whirlpool of his deeds, his words, his taunts. It spins us around, threatens to suck us under, and what Zodiac eloquently tell us is that for some people, that whirlpool is not temporary. For people like Graysmith and Toschi, people like Zodiac's surviving victims, that whirlpool will never stop. The lives Zodiac destroyed, or at the very least altered forever, aren't just those of the people he attacked. The obsession over what he did has run roughshod across countless lives, and if we can't pull ourselves away from his darkness, we might join them. It's a raw, deep, unnerving emotional well in the center of this thrilling true crime saga, and it helps to make Zodiac a masterpiece.

Zodiac is now streaming on Peacock. For more on the Zodiac case, watch the Peacock original docuseries The Myth of The Zodiac Killer.