Robert Downey Jr.’s 157-Minute Crime-Thriller Masterpiece Is Officially Back on Free Streaming

What makes a perfect crime thriller? I need a palpable sense of danger, combined with a ticking time clock, and a tight pace that grabs characters by the neck. Films like Prisoners (2013) and Nightcrawler (2014) fit into this mold, exploring gritty underworlds hidden beneath normalcy.

Sometimes, an excellent cat-and-mouse game like in Se7en (1995) is enough to elevate a police procedural that takes a darkly personal turn by the end. At other times, perfection takes the form of a tense manhunt that proves to be quite impossible to solve. David Fincher’s Zodiac accomplishes this with great skill, plunging its San Francisco Bay Area setting into visceral fear and paranoia. The film is now available to stream for free on Tubi.

Dramatizing the real-life unsolved case of the Zodiac Killer, the film maps how the titular criminal terrorized America by repeatedly taunting law enforcement and leaving ciphers for the public to solve. Zodiac closely follows cartoonist Robert Graysmith (Jake Gyllenhaal) and crime reporter Paul Avery’s (Robert Downey Jr.) labyrinthine attempts to catch the killer, which only lures them into a psychological maze with no exits.

After an unknown man attacks a couple at a lovers’ lane in July 1969, the San Francisco Chronicle receives encrypted letters from someone named Zodiac. The man threatens to kill a dozen people unless his coded message is published, prompting Graysmith to correctly deduce that the message doesn’t reveal the killer’s identity. Avery seems skeptical of Graysmith’s theory at first, but inadvertently pulls him into an obsessive spiral of clues related to the case.

While Zodiac is keenly interested in the killer’s chilling vision, it zooms in on Graysmith being consumed by the case as he closes in on his chosen suspect, Arthur Leigh Allen (John Carroll Lynch). Avery, on the other hand, is plagued by his own fears after receiving a threatening letter, increasingly impacted by the elusive suspect who revels in inflated public notoriety. The unsolved nature of the Zodiac Killer case haunts both men, leading them on different paths that bring their flaws and anxieties to the forefront.

RDJ has delivered several career-defining performances over the years, including Lewis Strauss in Oppenheimer (2023) and Charlie Chaplin in Chaplin (1992). Apart from redefining the modern superhero with Iron Man in the Marvel Cinematic Universe, RDJ has brought humor, charm, and eccentricity to films like Tropic Thunder (2008), Kiss Kiss Bang Bang (2005), and Sherlock Holmes (2009). His Paul Avery in Zodiac, however, is among his most nuanced roles, given the character’s drastic shift from a sharp, cocky reporter to a broken shell of a man who is haunted by a killer who loves to taunt.

This brilliant performance, complemented by an impressive Gyllenhaal and Mark Ruffalo (who plays the obsessively weary Inspector Dave Toschi), allows Zodiac to bring Fincher’s preoccupation with precision to life. It is a story about the repercussions of wanting to catch a killer, where a string of facts and a whole lot of theories can send even the most level-headed people down the conspiracy rabbit hole. Even when these men are in real danger, they never consider dropping out of the investigation — while their ways of coping differ, they remain entangled in this dizzying search.

Image: Paramount Pictures/Warner Bros. Pictures

Fincher avoids sensationalism in Zodiac the same way he does in Mindhunter, which takes the cerebral, slow-burn approach to serial killer psychology and the agents who study them. Both stories highlight the director’s trademark preference for stark framing and grounded realism, where the leads are utterly consumed by the tedious nature of criminal investigation. Zodiac achieves the same with greater urgency, rejecting traditional catharsis by opting for an ending that deliberately frustrates.

The greatest merit of Zodiac is its ability to draw and retain our attention without resorting to spectacle. It is a film that leverages our collective (if morbid) fascination with unsolved cases and holds up a mirror to the psychological toll it takes. The film is also a masterclass in suspense, where an anxious glance between two investigators holds much more weight than a shoot-out in any run-of-the-mill crime thriller. This is how Zodiac becomes the perfect crime thriller: By checking every conventional genre box and cleverly subverting expectations at the same time.

Zodiac is streaming on Tubi.