The first 2026 entry in our ongoing series of writers calling attention to their comfort films is David Fincher’s thriller
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t begins with a murder, and then another. A woman is killed, a man grievously injured, and a letter is sent to the news media. The killer gives himself a name – this is the Zodiac speaking – and provides a message written in code. So we start with three mysteries: the man, his motives and his message. The third is quickly cracked; the first hypothesized, but never definitively proven. But it’s the why of it all – why a man would kill at least five seemingly random people, and why we as a culture still care – that will require more significant investigation.
When it was first released more than 18 years ago, David Fincher’s Zodiac was considered a bit of an also-ran. Over two and a half hours long, it depicts the search for the Zodiac killer, who spent the late 60s terrorizing California’s Bay Area, as a series of bad leads and dead-ends, and concludes without definitively proving anything. It flopped at the box office and was not nominated for even a single Oscar.
Yet, to the great concern of my friends and loved ones, Zodiac has become my go-to rewatch. When I have nothing much to do, I might put on 20 or 30 minutes, and watch Inspector Dave Toschi (Mark Ruffalo), reporter Paul Avery (Robert Downey Jr) and San Francisco Chronicle cartoonist Robert Graysmith (Jake Gyllenhaal) attempt over years to untangle clues, allusions and near-misses knotted around the identity of the Zodiac killer.
