Zodiac ... on the trail of a mystery
After five years away, can David Fincher come back? His new film Zodiac (which failed to make its mark at the US box office) delves into an unsolved serial murder case that is to Americans what Jack the Ripper is to Brits.
Still rightly celebrated for his nineties classics Se7en and Fight Club, Fincher's last film was 2002's Panic Room, which even he seemed unsatisfied with. Throughout his career, Fincher has consistently been accused of favouring style over substance, and Panic Room seemed too much like an empty technical challenge
In Zodiac, the technical trappings serve the story, which follows three men in their bid to catch the evasive killer. It's an exercise in precise storytelling, and Fincher seems happy to reserve his trademark flash to clearly deliver the intricate narrative. In many ways, Zodiac is Fincher's version of All the President's Men - a tapestry of complex events stitched together by dozens of characters, in a procedural format, and hung against the backdrop of a newsroom. The director proves that he's still a master of modulating suspense. The two early murder scenes are icily cruel, ratcheting up the tension before the film shifts slowly through a noir-ish world revolving around those leading the Zodiac chase. The killer himself remains almost unseen, hovering on the periphery, as elusive to the viewer as he is to the police.
It's brave and daring subversion of the serial killer genre which has inevitably reignited the debate about the real Zodiac killer's identity. Whoever he is or was, he's been powerfully re-invoked by Fincher.
