A clockwork mechanism. That is what "Z" is. Not a film in the traditional sense of an unfurling narrative, but a device of Swiss precision, an incandescent assembly of narrative gears, rhythmic counterpoints, and jolts of pure political adrenaline. Costa-Gavras, a Greek exile who transforms his rage into a cinematic scalpel, doesn’t direct a work; he orchestrates an autopsy in real time. The autopsy of a democracy. The film opens with a warning that is a declaration of war: “Any resemblance to real events, to persons living or dead, is not accidental. IT IS INTENTIONAL.” It is the gauntlet thrown down against the Colonels' regime that had just strangled his homeland, a cinematic J’accuse so potent that it transcends its specific historical context to become the universal prototype of the modern political thriller.

Its structure is a vertiginous spiral. It begins with the placid arrogance of power, a lecture on the "ideological mildew" plaguing the nation, before exploding into the chaos of a public square, in an assassination disguised as an accident. From that moment, the film bifurcates. On one hand, we follow the past, fragments of the life and commitment of the Deputy (a charismatic Yves Montand, rendered almost mythological in his idealized absence), a pacifist doctor whose very existence is an affront to the system. On the other, we are plunged into a feverish present, the investigation led by the Examining Magistrate, a monumental Jean-Louis Trintignant in his metamorphosis. The editing by Agnès Guillemot, a student of Resnais, does more than simply cut and paste scenes; it shatters temporal linearity, weaving flashbacks, flash-forwards, and multiple points of view into a mosaic that reflects the very nature of truth: a fragmented entity, to be reassembled piece by piece against the monolithic narrative of the state-sanctioned lie.

It is here that "Z" makes its first, brilliant leap. It uses the kinetic, adrenaline-fueled language of genre cinema—the chase, the suspense, the plot twist—to convey a message of abyssal seriousness. It’s as if Sam Peckinpah had decided to adapt an essay by Hannah Arendt on the banality of evil. The score by Mikis Theodorakis, himself persecuted by the regime, is not mere accompaniment; it is the film’s accelerating heartbeat, a bouzouki that becomes an instrument of struggle, a tribal and obsessive rhythm that propels the action and the viewer toward a point of no return. Costa-Gavras understands that to denounce the asphyxiation of an authoritarian regime, you don’t need an intellectualized chamber drama, but an electric shock to jolt the audience out of its apathy. It is a Trojan horse: you walk into the theater expecting a French-style thriller and walk out with a searing lesson on the fragility of institutions.

The pulsating heart of this mechanism, however, is Trintignant’s Examining Magistrate. At first, he is a cog in the system. Impeccable, cold, almost inhuman in his dark suit, his thick glasses seeming to shield him from the world. He is a Kafkaesque figure, an official from an invisible castle who believes in procedure, in form, in the law as an abstract entity. And yet, witness by witness, lie by lie, his armor begins to crack. His is not an ideological conversion; it is an aesthetic revolt, almost a mathematical one. The lies of the military and the police don’t add up; they are inelegant, an offense to his logic, his sense of order. He is a technician of the law who, faced with the organized chaos of the conspiracy, rediscovers ethics. His investigation becomes an anomaly, a bug in the regime’s program. In this, his narrative arc is almost the inverse of the classic Western: he is not the sheriff imposing law on a wild frontier, but the man of the law who must become a moral outlaw to defend the law itself from those who are meant to embody it. He is the bureaucrat who becomes a hero not by choice, but by logical necessity.

The film, based on the novel by Vassilis Vassilikos chronicling the 1963 assassination of politician Grigoris Lambrakis, is imbued with a documentarian's urgency. Shot in Algeria—the only nation that dared to host such an openly anti-fascist production—its sun-bleached white architecture evokes a nameless and therefore universal Mediterranean. "Z" captures the oppressive atmosphere of a society under surveillance. The figures of the generals and police chiefs are not caricatured monsters. They are mediocre, grey men, whose danger lies precisely in their banal conviction that they are acting for the good of the nation, using Orwellian language where repression becomes "sanitation" and murder an "accident." They are the personification of power when it becomes an end in itself, a self-referential orgy of flags, parades, and whispered violence.

Then there is the meta-textual layer, a profound reflection on the nature of testimony in the age of mechanical reproduction. The key figure in uncovering the truth is not a policeman or a lawyer, but a photojournalist (a young and feverish Jacques Perrin, who was also the film’s producer). His camera, his snapshots, become the objective eye that unmasks the farce. The mechanical image stands in opposition to the state’s manipulated narrative. Costa-Gavras shows us the same scene multiple times from different angles, slowing it down, analyzing it, just as his photographer would in the darkroom or the magistrate in his office. Cinema itself becomes an instrument of inquiry, a way to dissect reality and expose deceit. In a pre-digital, pre-social media age, "Z" prophetically anticipates the central role of the image as both evidence and weapon in the conflict between citizens and power.

But Costa-Gavras's masterpiece would not be what it is without its ending, one of the most chilling and despairing in the history of cinema. After the Magistrate's meticulous reconstruction of the truth, after the indictment of top military and police officials, the viewer expects catharsis, the victory of justice. Instead, a series of implacable title cards, on a black screen broken only by the hammering sound of a teletype, informs us of the protagonists' fates. The Magistrate is removed from the case. The witnesses die in "strange" accidents. The guilty receive light sentences. The military seizes power in a coup. The triumph of the law was only an illusion, a brief interlude before nightfall. And then, the coup de grâce: the surreal and terrifying list of things banned by the new regime. Modern music, the Beatles, Sophocles, Tolstoy, freedom of the press, sociology, miniskirts, and the letter "Z," which stands for "Zei": "(he) is alive."

It is in this closing that the film transcends its time and becomes an eternal warning. It tells us that unmasking the lie is not enough. It tells us that truth, alone, cannot defeat power when power has decided to abandon all pretense of legality. "Z" is a perfect thriller in its execution, but a Greek tragedy in its soul. It is a work that demonstrates how cinema can be both popular art of the highest entertainment value and the sharpest instrument of civic conscience. It does not age, because the dynamics it depicts—the manipulation of truth, state violence disguised as order, the courage of the few against the complicity of the many—are, unfortunately, a perennial algorithm of human history. A perfect mechanism, yes, but one that is still ticking, ominously, today.