The first 2026 entry in our ongoing series of writers calling attention to their comfort films is David Fincher’s thriller

It begins with a murder, and then another. A woman is killed, a man grievously injured, and a letter is sent to the news media. The killer gives himself a name – this is the Zodiac speaking – and provides a message written in code. So we start with three mysteries: the man, his motives and his message. The third is quickly cracked; the first hypothesized, but never definitively proven. But it’s the why of it all – why a man would kill at least five seemingly random people, and why we as a culture still care – that will require more significant investigation.

When it was first released more than 18 years ago, David Fincher’s Zodiac was considered a bit of an also-ran. Over two and a half hours long, it depicts the search for the Zodiac killer, who spent the late 60s terrorizing California’s Bay Area, as a series of bad leads and dead-ends, and concludes without definitively proving anything. It flopped at the box office and was not nominated for even a single Oscar.