Zodiac

David Fincher won a lot of fans with his highly mannered serial killer film SE7EN. It looked grotesquely gorgeous, it was suffocatingly suspenseful and it was built on one of the fashionable theories about serial killers and their fetishistic games as performance artists.
I called him the John Bunyan of the police procedural.

Behind the mannerist curlicues there was a dour, dogged will to punish and be punished.
Now Fincher has returned to the police procedural in a film which is as meticulous an understated as SE7EN was over-embellished. Zodiac is based on the two books by Robert Graysmith about the identity of the killer who called himself 'Zodiac' and who committed and then wrote letters about a series of murders around California in the late sixties through to the mid seventies.

Graysmith was a cartoonist on the San Francisco Chronicle, one of the newspapers which used to receive letters from Zodiac with curiously coded and encrypted puzzles enclosed. A puzzle devotee, Graysmith became obsessed by the case. In effect he began to see it as one enormous puzzle.

And this is how the film unfolds.
Jake Gyllenhaal plays Graysmith, a mild, stooped former Eagle Scout so obsessed with the case he even goes through his colleague Paul Avery's wastebaskets. Avery is the crime reporter assigned to the case, a man as flamboyant as Graysmith is mousy.

He's played by Robert Downey Junior with his usual insouciance.
The third man in this trio is Mark Ruffalo's Detective Inspector David Toschi who believes he came close to arresting Zodiac only to have his requests for search warrants scuppered by the courts.
First one member of the trio, then a second, and then a third takes the lead in unravelling the Zodiac puzzle.

The murders were committed over different parts of California, leaving detectives in different jurisdictions trying to fit a picture together.
The murderer varied his killing techniques. He was smart enough to destroy most prints and identifying evidence.

He also confused things, the puzzled detectives came to think, by sometimes sending his letters claiming killings he didn't commit.
Zodiac is a study of obsession: the reporter; the detective; the puzzle solver Graysmith. And the killer.

Working with a script by James Vanderbilt, Fincher brings the pieces together beautifully. We leave the film with a very clear idea of who two of these investigators believe Zodiac was, and with an equally clear idea of the limits and frustrations of police work, and journalism.
The sixties and seventies are evoked in a visually understated way - no playing with pop culture here - but it is curious to be back in an age before most county police forces owned fax machines.

It's a long film, but an absorbing one and Fincher's best work to date.
The police case on the Zodiac murders remains open.