Film

Z is often referred to as a political thriller, but for anyone weaned on Enemy of the State or even older examples like Three Days of the Condor, the term thriller may seem a bit off. With a leftist’s curdled cynicism about the inherent corruption of most institutional structures, Costa-Gavras leads us up to the assassination of a liberal politician (Montand) and then follows a government investigator (Trintignant) who smells a conspiracy of corrupt officials behind the killing.

Costa-Gavras tackles the subject with a minute-by-minute approach that at first feels so detailed that it’s hard to find the through-line. We watch the rally organizers squabble when they lose their original venue (the police "suddenly" notice code infractions a day before the event), and then try to decide how seriously to take a threat on the life of the guest speaker. The tension builds precisely because we have to decide what details are significant. The assassination is handled with a similar piling on of incident, so that we feel as confused as the rally attendees about what is happening.

Once the government investigator shows up, we might hope for a quick revelation of the conspiracy and a tidy meting out of justice, but Costa-Gavras insists again on taking us through the investigation step by step. We can’t decide for a long stretch whether the investigator is corrupt too. Costa-Gavras’s methods aren’t those of the “traditional” thriller, but they thrill nonetheless.