Zodiac

Both are about the cost of watching. Hitchcock's photographer and Fincher's cartoonist are amateurs who cannot stop investigating, whose obsession damages the people nearest them, and who are right without being able to prove it. Fincher inherits the harder half of the idea: that the audience is doing the same thing, and is being invited to enjoy it. Zodiac withholds the confirmation Rear Window grants, which is the whole difference between a thriller and what Fincher made. Filed MEDIUM: a lineage in obsession rather than a stated debt.

Filed LOW because Fincher has not claimed it and the resemblance may be the subject rather than the source. Both films take a real unsolved serial killer case, refuse the catharsis of an arrest, and end on an investigator ruined by the not knowing. Both make the procedure itself the drama, and both close on a face looking directly at the question. Against it: two directors can arrive at the same shape from the same material, and Fincher's stated sources are the Graysmith books and All the President's Men.