In the shadows of this year’s impending Oscar ceremony, where his The Curious Case of Benjamin Button stands tall, if somewhat quietly on the buzz-meter, with 13 nominations, the most of any film, director David Fincher’s grossly underrated previous effort behind the camera, Zodiac, arrives to Blu-ray.

A dense but hypnotic and starkly involving account of the unsolved murders in California that spanned the late 1960s and 1970s. Part brooding investigative ensemble, part journalistic procedural in the vein of All The President’s Men, the film is a strikingly well stitched together vivisection of crime and obsession, marked by a painstaking, novelistic richness that showcases the heavy existential toll of the pursuit of punishment. Up to this point in time Fincher’s most mature work, as well as, on the surface, his least stylistically ambitious, Zodiac lacks the overt cop-versus-killer thrills of his genre hit Seven, but it will surely stand the test of time as a superlative entry in the crime canon, eventually sharing many a big city double-bill during retrospectives of the filmmaker’s work.

Based on the true story of a serial killer who for many years terrified the Northern California area and taunted authorities across the state with cryptic letters to the press, Zodiac is adapted from the non-fiction book of Robert Graysmith (Jake Gyllenhaal), a shy editorial cartoonist at the San Francisco Chronicle. On August 1, 1969, similar letters arrive in the press rooms of three different newspapers claiming responsibility for two previous attacks which left three young people dead and another critically injured. Along with details of the crimes are a series of coded messages, with instructions to publish them. By mid-October, two more assaults leave another two dead and one injured.

While San Francisco homicide detectives Dave Toschi (Mark Ruffalo) and William Armstrong (Anthony Edwards) work the case from their side, Graysmith indulges a growing interest in the awful affair with his gifted but cynical colleague, scruffy crime beat reporter Paul Avery (Robert Downey, Jr). Graysmith even unlocks a key reference to the 1932 film The Most Dangerous Game in one of the Zodiac’s ciphers; Avery becomes a stated target of the killer, touching off his downward descent into drugs and alcohol.

Inter-jurisdictional nightmares ensue. In decided contrast to the inviolabilities of modern-day forensics often showcased in such genre pieces, the police in Zodiac are shown to be continually frustrated by problems with respect to evidence analysis, tracing and simple coordination. Conflicting modes of exploit and the Zodiac’s contradictory staked claims to crimes he likely didn’t commit only muddy the waters. Over the course of many months and years, though, a tangled labyrinth of evidence eventually points to a compelling suspect. When this individual is cleared, Armstrong begs off the case. Graysmith, meanwhile, launches his own dogged investigation, conferring occasionally with a still haunted Toschi. Many more years pass. As much as the rigorously detailed Zodiac is about specifically its namesake case, it’s also a movie about the associated effects of the hunt for a murderer, and the heavy price — materially, socially, psychologically, emotionally — those seekers pay.

That screenwriter James Vanderbilt (Basic, The Rundown) avoids conventional payoffs is somewhat of a given knowing the nature of the material. It’s the dark humor and digressive details of his script, though, which help truly moor the story and add to its overall tension. They make the expansive backdrop, its galloping pace — weeks, months and sometimes even years flit by with dispassionate textual cards — and the manner in which characters flow in and out of the story feel even more real.

Zodiac‘s actual violence is relatively minimal, but frontloaded and grimly depicted. Fincher captures the sudden and arbitrary nastiness of these acts, and they carry a nasty wallop and enduring influence that hang menacingly over the rest of the film. Visually, Fincher applies the same exacting sense of detail and framing to Zodiac as his other films, abetted by Donald Graham Burt’s fantastic production design and occasional collaborator Harris Savides’ cinematography. Everything from the spot-on costumes, setting and newsroom lighting to David Shire’s score and a discerning selection of period rock tunes (Boz Scaggs, Donovan, Marvin Gaye, et al) exudes the time period in question. Fincher furthermore makes savvy use of a variety of directorial techniques — from a compressed montage of talk radio chatter to a time-lapsed sequence involving the construction of the city’s iconic Transamerica Building — to briskly and artfully convey wide swaths of time.

The cast is superbly chosen, and the performances are uniformly engaging in their own ways. Downey, Jr, impresses his own idiosyncratic charm onto the role of Avery, while Fincher bleeds Ruffalo of the undue earnestness that has weighed down some of his recent work, resulting in the actor’s most lingeringly memorable performance since You Can Count On Me. A brilliant new classic of its field, Zodiac breathes life into the police procedural drama, weaving a deeply humanistic tapestry.

Its outer cover a canted replication of the envelope from the first letter sent to the San Francisco Chronicle by the killer, Zodiac is presented on Blu-ray in 2.35:1 non-anamorphic 1080p widescreen, with an English language TrueHD 5.1 surround sound audio track and optional subtitles in English, English SDH, French and Spanish. Since it’s spread out over two discs, just like the double-disc director’s cut of the film that hit regular DVD last year, the picture and sound quality of the feature has plenty of room to breathe, and is of course superb — free from digital artifacting, and marked by deep, consistent colors. Two audio commentary tracks sit on the first disc with the film itself — one with Fincher and one a patchwork affair with Gyllenhaal, Downey, Jr., Vanderbilt, producer Brad Fischer and writer James Ellroy, who is unaffiliated with the movie itself but obviously knows a lot about criminal non-fiction. Of these, Fincher’s is marked by an impressive breadth and easygoing listenability, though both are superlative when stacked up against the vast majority of chat-alongs, simply owing to the intellect of their participants.

A quartet of meaty featurettes and a feature-length documentary occupy the set’s second disc, and collectively serve as a prime, top-shelf example of how Blu-ray’s extra space can be used to spotlight both production detail as well as extracurricular, but extremely relevant corroborative material. Running about an hour and 40 minutes, This is the Zodiac Speaking is a fascinating, comprehensive examination of the Zodiac case that includes sit-down chats with many of the real investigators and other people involved in the case. The movie itself, meanwhile, gets a in-depth, start-to-edit-bay overview that’s divided into seven chapters, and runs just under 55 minutes. A separate, chilling, 42-minute look at prime suspect Arthur Leigh Allen culls extra interview material from This is the Zodiac Speaking to take a closer look at the man Graysmith makes a convincing case was the Zodiac killer. In addition to the film’s theatrical trailer, shorter looks at Fincher’s great ease with digital effects and previsualization technique showcase how he was able to meticulously recreate entire neighborhoods, with spatial exactitude and great detail. To purchase the double-disc Blu-ray via Amazon, click here. A+ (Movie) A (Disc)