Z (1969)
There are political thrillers, and then there are films that arrive so charged with real-world fury that the fiction barely disguises the rage beneath. Costa-Gavras's Z (1969) is very much the latter. Based on Vassilis Vassilikos's 1966 novel of the same name, the film draws directly from the 1963 assassination of Grigoris Lambrakis, a Greek left-wing politician killed in Thessaloniki under circumstances that implicated state security forces. The Greek military junta, which had seized power in 1967, promptly banned both the book and the film, which tells you something about how close to the bone Costa-Gavras was cutting. Produced through a Franco-Algerian arrangement involving Valoria Films, Reggane Films, and the Algerian state body ONCIC, the production had to be shot largely in Algeria precisely because filming in Greece was out of the question. It is, in some ways, a companion piece to The Battle of Algiers, another work from the same era that used the machinery of cinema to dramatise state violence and its aftermath with an almost documentary insistence on credibility.
Costa-Gavras himself was a Greek-born filmmaker working primarily within the French film industry, and Z represented a significant leap in his profile. He had made a couple of polished but unremarkable crime pictures in the mid-1960s before landing on this project, and the film turned him into an internationally recognised name almost overnight. His approach here is kinetic and urgent, leaning on rapid editing (courtesy of Françoise Bonnot, who won an Academy Award for her work) and Mikis Theodorakis's score, recorded covertly since Theodorakis was himself imprisoned in Greece at the time. The film runs at 122 minutes and carries the structure of a procedural: an assassination during a public demonstration, followed by a government and military establishment keen to bury the evidence, and a lone magistrate determined to follow the facts wherever they lead. The screenplay, co-written by Costa-Gavras and Jorge Semprún, is a dense piece of work that keeps a large cast of characters in careful orbit around each other. For a sense of the era's appetite for politically charged international cinema, it is worth noting that Yves Montand, who plays the murdered deputy, had already appeared in The Wages of Fear some sixteen years earlier, a film that shares a certain bruising interest in systems that grind people down.
The cast assembled here is exceptional by any measure. Montand brings a natural charisma and a believable idealism to the deputy, even though his screen time is curtailed by the nature of the story. Irène Papas, herself Greek and acutely aware of what the subject matter represented, is quietly devastating in a role that asks her to carry enormous grief with restraint. Jean-Louis Trintignant plays the investigating magistrate with a cool, watchful intelligence, and it is largely through his eyes that the procedural second half of the film unfolds. Jacques Perrin, who also co-produced the picture, and Charles Denner round out a cast that keeps the film anchored in something recognisably human even as the political machinery around them grows ever more sinister. These are not showy performances; the film does not really invite that kind of acting. Everyone here is doing careful, considered work in service of a story that already carries considerable emotional and historical weight.
I went into Costa-Gavras’s 1969 political thriller Z knowing it carries immense gravitas. It’s one of the highest-rated films on Letterboxd, regularly touted as one of the greatest political thrillers ever made, and it even made history as the first foreign language film to be nominated for both Best Picture and Best Foreign Language Film at the Academy Awards. On top of that, it was the late, great Roger Ebert’s top film of 1969. With a pedigree and historical weight like that, I’d expect to be absolutely hooked from start to finish.
And to be fair, when the film is firing, it’s brilliant. The opening scenes are fantastic, establishing a tense, urgent atmosphere right out of the gate. As the story develops following the assassination of a charismatic leftist deputy and the subsequent investigation by a determined magistrate, it takes on a really gripping Rashomon feel. Watching the different factions piece together (and deliberately twist) the truth of what happened that night is easily the most compelling part of the picture. Costa-Gavras clearly knows how to build a paranoid, high-stakes world and get top-tier, grounded performances from his leads.
But here’s the rub: I really struggled to stay interested for the entire runtime. For all its thematic brilliance, the film is just far too long, and it suffers heavily from endless, drawn-out talking scenes. While I appreciate the meticulous detailing of the political cover-up, sitting through minutes on end of men in rooms arguing over legalities and bureaucratic procedures became a proper slog. It’s the kind of deliberate, talky pacing that might have flown in the late 60s, but today, it just tests your patience and drains the tension from what should be a thrilling narrative.
Ultimately, Z is a landmark piece of cinema that absolutely earns its historical respect, but it didn't quite connect with me on a purely entertaining level. It’s a vital, hard-hitting political drama, but the glacial pacing in the second half keeps it from being a flawless experience. It’s a highly important film with a cracking premise and some great performances, but if you’re going in expecting a tight, fast-paced thriller, be prepared for a bit of a bureaucratic marathon.
Z occupies a particular place in cinema history, one it has earned through the genuine risk of its making as much as through its craft. It arrived at a moment when audiences in France, Algeria, and beyond were primed to receive exactly this kind of politically engaged filmmaking, and its Academy Award nominations (including Best Picture, a genuinely rare distinction for a foreign language film) reflected a broader hunger for cinema that took the world seriously. Whether it holds up as a piece of pure entertainment is, as the review above suggests, a more complicated question. The films that matter most are not always the easiest company.
Rating: ★★★½ | Year: 1969 | Watched: 2026-06-12
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