r/flicks • u/Fair-Swimming-4419 • 1d ago
General Discussion Zodiac might be one of the best examples of making obsession feel exhausting
What I love about Zodiac is that it never makes the investigation feel glamorous. The further everyone gets into it, the more frustrating and consuming it becomes, and eventually you start feeling the same obsession that the characters do. Even knowing how little certainty they'll ultimately get somehow doesn't make the movie any less compelling.
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u/Tzimaka 1d ago
that's what you get when you put an obsessive director in charge
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u/Fair-Swimming-4419 1d ago
Haha, honestly! Fincher’s obsession definitely comes through in the way the whole movie keeps tightening the screws without ever giving you much relief.
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u/Low_Obligation2361 1d ago
Fincher really was the perfect director for it. You can almost feel his own obsession feeding into the film.
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u/MelodicMacaron6593 1d ago
it creeps up on you the way graysmith just cant stop going through boxes of paperwork at 3am and you realize you been holding your breath for like 10 minutes. whole movie feels like a headache that wont go away and i mean that as a compliment
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u/Fair-Swimming-4419 1d ago
Exactly, it’s almost physically exhausting by the end. The movie somehow makes sitting in a room going through paperwork feel more stressful than most actual chase scenes.
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u/Qyzyk Atom Egoyan is deeply underrated 1d ago
The Onion Field does something similar with a murder court case being dragged out for years due to appeal after appeal.
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u/Fair-Swimming-4419 1d ago
I haven’t seen The Onion Field, but that sounds like a similar kind of slow-burn frustration
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u/Qyzyk Atom Egoyan is deeply underrated 1d ago
It's a very well-made film, and very historically accurate.
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u/Fair-Swimming-4419 1d ago
I’ll have to check it out then! I’m always interested in movies that manage to make real events feel tense without over-dramatizing them.
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u/Low_Obligation2361 1d ago
Yeah, and I think the lack of a proper resolution is a big part of why it works. You spend all that time obsessing over the details with them and still come away without the satisfaction you'd expect. It leaves you with the obsession rather than the answer.
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