FASCINATING, FRUSTRATING FIXATION WITH A KILLER.

Byline: Glenn Whipp

Film Critic

David Fincher's "Zodiac" opens with a sequence as creepy and menacing as you're likely to see all year. It's nighttime, and we're looking through the passenger window of a car that's slowly driving through a suburban neighborhood. It's the Fourth of July, summertime, but well past the Summer of Love. Donovan's "Hurdy Gurdy Man" wafts through the air.

The car, containing a young couple, eventually ends up by a lake, where it parks, presumably so the couple can do what young peop oding in the distance, and something doesn't feel right. Another car drives up, stops, then drives away. A minute later, it returns, uncomfortably long time.

When someone -- we never see the face -- gets out of the second car, the tension is almost unbearable.

From this bang-bang set piece and a subsequent impeccably staged murder (Fincher did make "Se7en," after all), we get the impre he Zodiac Killer, the serial murderer who terrorized the Bay Area in the late 1960s and early '70s. But Fincher's film shifts gears e men looking for the killer, which means, to some extent, that "Zodiac" is about our own compulsive interest in murder.

Fincher is an obsessive, too 7/8 about detail, about mood, about information. Where "Zodiac" comes up short at times is in cha Michael Mann's "Miami Vice," which isn't surprising since Mann and Fincher approach filmmaking from a similar aesthetic. At their heir stories in all the murky atmospherics.

What fascinates Fincher and screenwriter James Vanderbilt isn't the Zodiac Killer or his methods or the coded letters he sent to the killer was never caught. We're not even sure who he was. In our "CSI" era where every murder mystery is neatly wrapped up in rs revel in the uncertainty.

That ambiguity and Fincher's meticulousness can make "Zodiac," clocking in at more than 2 1/2 hours, something of a long sit. Y sco homicide inspector Dave Toschi (Mark Ruffalo), San Francisco Chronicle reporter Paul Avery (Robert Downey Jr.) and the Chronicle lenhaal) -- each deal with the lack of closure in their own way.

The Toschi and Avery characters work. Their motives and torment are understandable, and Downey and Ruffalo make the emotions real Curiously, given his prominent connection to the case as a celebrated author, it's Graysmith that remains something of a cipher.

And perhaps there's a good reason for that vagueness. Some things, the movie asserts, just aren't knowable. That's a difficult co such an information overload that we believe everything can be answered - definitively.

"Zodiac" then is an obsessive, ambiguous movie about obsessives struggling with ambiguity. And, yes, it's as fascinating and fr Glenn Whipp, [phone]

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ZODIAC - Three stars

(R: strong violence, language.)

Starring: Jake Gyllenhaal, Mark Ruffalo, Robert Downey Jr.

Director: David Fincher.

Running time: 2 hr. 36 mins.

Playing: In wide release.

In a nutshell: A thriller less about the Zodiac Killer than about the men fixated on finding him. It's an obsessive, ambiguous movie that's as fascinating and frustrating as that sounds.

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Photo:

Jake Gyllenhaal plays San Francisco Chronicle cartoonist Robert Graysmith, who becomes obsessed with the Zodiac serial killings.