100/100

Paranoia thrives in the dewy mist of San Francisco while Evil wanders loose, and although Zodiac crafts traditional scares and deliberate suspense around its massive runtime, Fincher's masterpiece sends chills down the spine because it's true. David Fincher shoves the viewer into a maze with several beginnings and no ends, and the mystery arrives like a mailbox after a month of vacation.

Fincher has always had a knack for artificiality within intensely human stories, but in Zodiac, every character feels like a personal construct that lives outside the frame. Every actor takes their particular material and crafts something even more glorious out of already wondrous writing. As a result, the world of Zodiac has an immaculate contrast between sympathetic individuals and the oddly inorganic sheen of San Francisco's eerie streets. It's a fantastic way of allowing the viewer to slowly enter the environment of a film without feeling overwhelmed by the subject matter or the way the story is being told.

Zodiac, above all else, is a favorite of mine that I find extraordinarily hard to write about or discuss. It's enormous, groundbreaking, frightening, and passionate film-making that never fails to leave me slack-jawed and deeply disturbed. I've seen it countless times, and in a strange way, whenever "Hurdy Gurdy Man" gently flows from the screen, I'm anticipating an end different from the one that I've witnessed before.

If history is said to repeat itself, then we're all fucked.