‘Zodiac Killer Project’ Review: A Frustrated Filmmaker Takes Aim at the Industry’s True-Crime Addiction
It’s worth mourning the films we’ll never get to see: the unfunded epics, the unmarketable art films, perhaps even the unengaging streaming product. Filmmaker Charlie Shackleton faced that grief when his thoroughly researched project, a documentary on the Zodiac killer case, got the plug pulled after years in development. But the director’s vision was simply too comprehensive for the project to go unrealized. In the comically plainly titled “Zodiac Killer Project,” Shackleton explains how his film would’ve unfolded, speaking in a consolation-prize confessional.
The candid narrator, who is also a published film critic, emerges with more than just his regrets. The doc is also a playful evaluation of the true-crime content bubble and the genre’s full capitulation to copycatting itself.
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Though Shackleton’s feature can’t legally cite its source material as the 2012 book “The Zodiac Killer Cover-up: The Silent Badge,” it is all but an official adaptation. The director had initially negotiated film rights with the family of its author, former CHP officer Lyndon E. Lafferty, who died in 2016. “The Silent Badge” was a decades-long endeavor for the ex-cop, who was convinced he had a run-in with the Zodiac and, after allegedly being admonished by police superiors, launched an off-the-books investigation into his suspect. Shackleton was drawn to Lafferty’s novel because it represented new material in the extremely picked-over Zodiac files. But while the filmmaker was location scouting in the killer’s old stamping ground, the rights agreement with the family went to pieces.
“Zodiac Killer Project” sees Shackleton recounting the narrative beats he’d planned for the film, speaking in a wandering, reflective cadence over long shots of Bay Area exteriors. Occasionally, Shackleton will enter a trance imagining certain climactic sequences, before cracking himself up and breaking his own spell. Throw in a few insert shots of things like crime-scene flashbulbs and burning documents — visual tropes that Shackleton calls out as such — and “Zodiac Killer Project” gets remarkably close to resembling an actual true-crime doc. The great joke, and the central thesis, is that the film can accomplish that by using only spare parts. It’s also why the doc hits against the limits of its thought experiment rather quickly: a parody of a boring, repetitive genre is still rule-bound by that genre’s playbook.
Shackleton, seen in a few recording booth appearances, does seem genuinely dejected about his original ideas. “Fuck, it would’ve been good,” he exhales after laying out his eye-grabbing opening. But the trickier, engaging game of “Zodiac Killer Project” is assessing how seriously the filmmaker was really taking this material in the first place.
Taken generously, Lafferty was a man who realized he could only seek the truth by taking matters into his own hands. But objectively, his effort was a wild goose chase: a guerrilla operation hindered by tunnel vision for one specific suspect. The story gets more preposterous as it goes, even including a turn in which Lafferty and his target enter the same social circles later in life. Robert Graysmith, the obsessive who authored the most popular book about the case and was played by Jake Gyllenhaal in David Fincher’s “Zodiac,” also would’ve made a character in Shackleton’s feature. Here, Graysmith resembles the success story to Lafferty’s humdrum operation: a bit like how Bob Dylan figures into the ironic ending of the Coen brothers’ “Inside Llewyn Davis.”
Even funnier, the conclusion that Shackleton lays out for his project strongly resembles the penultimate scene of Fincher’s film. Though the similarities aren’t acknowledged, it’s another instance of Shackleton dog-earing true-crime tropes, here calling out the cynical calculation of their ambiguous endings. There are plenty of other drive-by criticisms against the product that has proliferated in the past decade, including the fast-eroding restraint of “Making a Murderer” and the hypocritical moralizing of Ryan Murphy’s Dahmer series “Monster.” In one segment, noting how many former cops call themselves “bulldogs” in talking-head interviews, Shackleton finds humor in how the genre can operate with “no direction required.”
The uncomfortable truth is that the original, unmade Zodiac killer project — not “Zodiac Killer Project” itself — seems beneath an artist like Shackleton. The Brit first broke through in 2016 when his 10-hour film “Paint Drying,” conceived to protest censorship and the prohibitive cost of independent filmmaking, was submitted to the British Board of Film Classification, forcing those authorities to watch exactly what was on the package. But work is still work, and Shackleton admits early in the doc that most nonfiction filmmakers will find themselves pulled into true-crime in today’s industry.
The director basks a bit in the craft of his original vision, but that he can so vividly lay out a film that doesn’t exist speaks to the genre’s near-automated organization in its ascent to market dominance. The dry, minimalist “Zodiac Killer Project” was selected to play Sundance’s experimental NEXT category: a curatorial victory that seems an ambush in itself. Shackleton all but cops to this, asking, “How many people are even going to watch this realistically?” Certainly less than a small fraction of the audience that fired up Netflix’s own Zodiac killer docuseries while folding laundry last year.
Speaking to viewers who are cognizant of what films can and cannot be made, “Zodiac Killer Project” is a biting statement on how many artists have been funneled into a creative dead-end by a trend-chasing market.
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