READ MORE: Critic's Choice: Best of 2007

• Zodiac stills • David Fincher feature • Seven review • Jake Gyllenhaal feature

GLENN KENNY'S REVIEW (posted 2/28/07)

For some, the restraint of Zodiac will be the most shocking thing about it. The director, David Fincher, is perhaps best known for the grisly cinematic guignol Seven, and Zodiac is about a real-life serial killer who terrorized California's Bay Area — and more vicariously, the rest of America with both his murders and his taunting, often coded communications to the police and the media. There's definitely the potential for a crassly manipulative gore-fest here. But Fincher's near-epic-length film (it's about two hours and forty minutes), scripted by James Vanderbilt from two books by Robert Graysmith, is instead a complex, multi-layered, two-pronged account of the case. On the one hand, it's a recounting of Zodiac's crimes and a frustrating/engrossing police procedural; on the other, it's a story of one man's obsession with the case and where it takes him. That man is Graysmith, who was an editorial cartoonist at the San Francisco Chronicle when Zodiac's letters started coming in. A puzzle hobbyist, he applied himself to breaking Zodiac's codes, and thus began a pursuit of the case that turned his life inside out.

Not just his life. Graysmith, played by Jake Gyllenhaal, sees his colleague Paul Avery (Robert Downey, Jr) pulled further down into an abyss of drug and alcohol abuse after being threatened by Zodiac; sees the honest detective who's been aiding him without authorization accused of faking Zodiac letters as a publicity stunt; and doesn't see his own marriage falling apart as he goes through mountains of files with a fine-toothed comb (but no pen or pad, since he's going where he's not allowed to be). In the meantime, Zodiac himself, who by this point seems to have stopped his killing spree, teases, feints, and threatens.

No — this movie does not follow the typical chronology of a serial killer thriller. And the scenes showing the serial killer at work, while pretty upsetting (as well they ought to be) are not cinematically hypertrophied set pieces. Perhaps it's Fincher's pursuit of accuracy, or respect for the dead, at work here. In any case, it makes for a daringly different kind of thriller — cerebral, meticulous, haunting.

— Glenn Kenny