Zodiac

David Fincher’s Zodiac dramatizes the real-life investigations into the Zodiac Killer, who terrorized Northern California in the late 1960s and 1970s with a series of murders and cryptic letters sent to newspapers. The film is adapted from Robert Graysmith’s two non-fiction books; Graysmith, played by Jake Gyllenhaal, was a cartoonist at the San Francisco Chronicle who became obsessively involved in the case. Alongside Graysmith, journalist Paul Avery (Robert Downey Jr.) and detective Dave Toschi (Mark Ruffalo) embody different failed attempts to “solve” the killer’s identity. The story is less about closure than about obsession, paranoia, and the inability to find certainty in an era already marked by political unrest, social upheaval, and cultural anxiety.

The film unfolds as a procedural investigation spanning decades, beginning with the Zodiac’s first killings and following the widening circle of obsession around him. The narrative fractures between Graysmith’s growing fixation, the journalists’ frustrations, and the police’s procedural dead ends. Instead of a single climax or resolution, the storyline mirrors the open-endedness of the real case: evidence is partial, suspects remain ambiguous, and answers slip away just as they seem within reach. In this way, Zodiac becomes less a conventional thriller than a chronicle of failure and futility.

Shot by Harris Savides using the Viper FilmStream digital camera, Zodiac is one of the earliest major films to embrace high-definition digital cinematography. But instead of highlighting digital aesthetics, Fincher and Savides carefully reconstructed the naturalistic textures of 1970s analogue film, echoing Gordon Willis’s cinematography in All the President’s Men. The film was digitally shot, then printed back onto 35mm for exhibition, creating a hybrid material form that mirrors its themes: a digital simulation of analogue history, much like the detectives’ attempts to reconstruct truth from fragmentary media. This choice situates Zodiac in a transitional moment in film history, when digital cinema was emerging but still haunted by celluloid’s visual language.

Zodiac is now regarded as one of Fincher’s most ambitious and meticulous works, standing apart from the spectacle of Fight Club or Gone Girl. Its influence is felt in both the aesthetics of digital filmmaking - showing that digital cameras could emulate the richness of celluloid - and in the genre of true-crime cinema, where obsession, ambiguity, and media spectacle take precedence over resolution. Thematically, the film captures the cultural paranoia of both the 1970s and the 2000s, making it resonate across eras. The Zodiac Killer himself remains an open case, and Fincher’s film underscores how the figure survives as much in media and myth as in history.