a review of 十二宫

FLOPUARY #12 + ANTI-CRITERION CHALLENGE #10: THE 2000s Glad to finally catch up with one after a good 15+ years of not quite finding the time for a big true-crime epic. I'm guessing the running time might have been why audiences also didn't flock to this one back in the day? Weirdly enough, I'm also happy to have watched the wildly-speculative but not altogether inaccurate '70s exploitation-docudrama THE ZODIAC KILLER (1971) a few months ago for Hooptober; Fincher's stagings of the confirmed Zodiac murders are much more slickly produced than the earlier film's, but fundamentally similar enough that I have to retroactively give some credit for verisimilitude to the other director. But the true meat of this film are the performances by Gyllenhaal, Ruffalo, Downey, and the rest of the all-star cast of recognizable (but not distractingly so) character actors showing up in bit parts in this, and the overall atmosphere of paranoid obsession as Gyllenhaal's character descends further into the twisting narrative of the real-life investigation. I will freely admit to not having read enough about the Zodiac murders to know the precise lines between fact and fiction here, but I think Fincher artfully presents us with something that takes what we know and extrapolates upon it in a dramatically satisfying way.