The twist to David Fincher’s Fight Club comes in the film’s latter end, and the twist to Se7en comes in its final minutes, but the twist to Zodiac, for me at least, came after I had left the theater.

I took Zodiac at face value from beginning to end, assuming that, through every tedious detail of this murder mystery, Fincher was as obsessed with the Zodiac killer as was his protagonist Robert Graysmith (Jake Gyllenhaal). A scene late in the film where Graysmith becomes spooked by a man who turns out probably isn’t the Zodiac I took simply as a last minute attempt at injecting some tension into an otherwise dry telling of the play by play of the Zodiac investigation.

But walking out of the theater I caught the film’s advertising poster with its one sentence tag line “There's more than one way to lose your life to a killer.” I don’t know how I didn’t catch it before, but now the film’s turned up-side-down on me, very much like Se7en in its finale. Maybe Graysmith isn’t our hero, but a cautionary tale. The mad attention to every detail on Fincher’s part a hint at Graysmith’s madness in its pursuit. The heavy breathing phone calls that he eventually receives, are they real or perceived? Perhaps the aforementioned scene that scares Graysmith isn’t to get us to share his fear but to pity his neurosis. Indeed, the only thing that gets more attention than the search for the Zodiac is the dwindling of Graysmith’s family relationships in the process.

The problem with this approach, as much as I like the idea of it, is that Graysmith’s ruthless investigation of the Zodiac is the only thing that ever lead anyone to get even close to a sound idea as to who the killer was. Graysmith accomplished on his own what lead inspector David Toschi (Mark Ruffalo) never did. Graysmith IS a hero.

We are left then with an awfully paradoxical film – whichever way you look at it – and a rather long one at that. No doubt that Fincher, who revels in such schizophrenia, is acutely aware of the problem and enjoys teasing it out for us.. Unfortunately, this little existential dilemma isn’t enough to hold up a film of this size.

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