With his upcoming sequel to Quentin Tarantino’s “Once Upon a Time in Hollywood” titled “The Adventures of Cliff Booth,” being released this summer, David Fincher deserves a retrospective on his career up to this point. One of the best thriller directors of the last few decades, these are Fincher's five best films, ranked.
No. 5: Seven
The unnamed city of “Seven” is one of the best atmospheres conjured in film. The never ending rain, the oppressiveness of the train and the grimy underworld permeating the streets of the city serve as the perfect backdrop for the seven deadly sins-centered serial killer storyline.
Brad Pitt and Morgan Freeman are solid as the film’s lead detectives as they piece together the clues of a number of gory killings around the city, but the ever-creepy Kevin Spacey gives the most memorable performance as the nightmarishly chilling John Doe, the film’s killer.
As the lead detectives unlock the motives of Doe, the sick underbelly that Fincher so often examines is revealed to the viewer in more and more twisted ways.
No. 4: Gone Girl
The most recent film on this list, "Gone Girl," is consistently shocking and unpredictable.
The performances of Ben Affleck and Rosamund Pike as Nick and Amy Dunne in “Gone Girl” conjure up two of the most detestable protagonists seen in film. But the competitive cunning of both Nick and Amy is a sort of twisted cat-and-mouse that is extremely captivating.
The film centers around the fraught marriage of Nick and Amy as she attempts to frame him for her own disappearance and murder. Constantly subverting what the viewer thinks they know, “Gone Girl” is impossible to look away from until the credits roll.
No. 3: The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo
Likely Fincher’s most underrated film, “The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo,” is distinctly brutal in a filmography already known for its brutality. Initially following an investigation into the disappearance of a 16-year-old girl, the film spirals far beyond the bounds of just one crime.
The score by frequent Fincher collaborators Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross undercuts the twisting and turning storyline as the mystery of countless twentieth-century killings is unraveled by Mikael Blomkvist (Daniel Craig) and Lisbeth Salander (Rooney Mara).
While the content of "The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo" can certainly be sickening at times, as Blomkvist and Salander uncover decades of the worst humanity has to offer, its suspense is so effective and entertaining that it's still worth a watch.
No. 2: The Social Network
A dive into Mark Zuckerberg (Jesse Eisenberg) and the creation of Facebook, “The Social Network,” gets more relevant with each passing year, as Zuckerberg’s Meta platforms are so ubiquitous and controversial today.
Perhaps making “The Social Network” more unsettling than the previous films on this list is the extensive real-world effects of the events portrayed in the film. Made in 2010, the prescience of “The Social Network” feels today like watching the makings of a train wreck while being helpless to stop it.
Absent of the violence present in most of Fincher’s other films, “The Social Network” retains his signature tension with a score also composed by Reznor and Ross as the film follows Zuckerberg’s Harvard years as he grows into the multi-billionaire now known all too well.
No. 1: Zodiac
Fincher’s portrayal of the investigations of the Bay Area Zodiac killings of the late '60s and early '70s stands out among all serial killer films as one of the strongest in the genre, and the best in his filmography.
While not usually considered a horror film, the tension and unease felt throughout the film blow most other horror films out of the water with the fear it’s able to induce in the viewer, with that dread reaching its peak at the iconic basement scene where Fincher doubles the viewer’s heart rate using just a few short lines and an enclosed space.
While the film’s A-list leads Jake Gyllenhaal, Robert Downey, Jr. and Mark Ruffalo all give excellent performances, John Carroll Lynch is particularly unnerving as suspected Zodiac Killer Arthur Leigh Allen. As he so coldly and eloquently puts it, “I’m not the Zodiac. And if I was, I certainly wouldn’t tell you.”