Zodiac Killer Project

After Charlie Shackleton's planned documentary adaptation of former California Highway Patrol officer Lyndon Lafferty's book The Zodiac Killer Cover-Up: The Silenced Badge was thwarted, the young British critic and filmmaker decided to make a movie explaining what his picture would have been. In the ponderous opening, Shackleton's voiceover details how he planned to start by staging a reenactment of a moment in which Lafferty—who, after being dismissed from the case in the 1970s, spent decades unofficially investigating the serial killer with six colleagues—had a wordless encounter with the man he believes was the Zodiac, whom he calls George Russell Tucker in the book. As the opening stretched on and on, I bristled in my seat. I started to wonder if the only thing worse than sitting through a generic, lazily produced true crime documentary is having a would-be generic, lazily produced true crime documentary explained to you. But then the credits roll as Shackleton starts to identify all the ways in which his movie would have ended up utilizing the same exhausted stylistic and narrative tropes as the countless other true crime docs that litter the algorithms of Netflix and other streaming services. Using clips from several of the most well-known of these features and docu-series, we quickly come to understand that this film about a film that didn't get made is also going to be a take-down of this entire sub-genre of documentary filmmaking.

While Zodiac Killer Project is not a satire, it does have something in common with most of the best examples of that comedic form: the satirist clearly loves what he's sending up. Even though Shackleton sometimes audibly laughs as he describes the shamelessly hackneyed directorial choices he would have employed had he been able to secure the rights to Lafferty's book, there seems to be no question that he would have indulged in them all himself. He delights in every opportunity to shame hack documentarians for things like their reliance on what is described in the industry as "evocative B-roll." Yet, he also admits that filmmakers almost have to resort to such techniques when making this kind of movie. The montage of shots from other features and series that he cuts together to explain what "evocative B-roll" is, is as funny as the opening credits in which he skewers the contrived and utterly clichéd ways these programs establish their tone with nearly identical choices in music, drone footage, interview soundbites, news media clips, even the color grading and the font style and text size of the titles. Looked at coldly, this is a comical indictment of the frustrating limitations of the true crime form—to say nothing of its moral and ethical implications. However, it also highlights the undeniable, narcotic-like allure of this dubious style of "journalism."

We spend most of Shackleton's 91-minute essay film wondering if what is essentially a feature-length commentary track for a movie that never existed will ultimately achieve anything more than it is currently doing. It doesn't, but its a damn engaging and at times hilarious movie nonetheless. While it doesn't get too deep into why we as a culture are so fascinated with true crime—the way countless articles, podcast, and think pieces have—it paints a detailed picture of an obviously intelligent individual who devours this type of content even though he knows full well how empty most of it is. Indeed, it seems clear that Shackleton's desire to adapt Lafferty's book was not motivated by a belief that his film would have shed any new light on the most discussed, written about, documented, and narrativized unsolved serial killer case this side of Jack the Ripper. He wanted to adapt this book merely because it existed, was a good read, and, as a yet-unfilmed angle on the case, was ripe for transformation into yet another example of this tired and tiresome medium.

Because of the shallow underlying motivations for the film that didn't get made, Zodiac Killer Project is undoubtedly a far more interesting movie than whatever Zodiac Killer documentary Shackleton would have made from Lafferty's book. The fact that this film is redundant and repetitive, follows a dubious sleuth whose conclusions amounted to nothing more than speculation, and sheds zero new light on an already overanalyzed case is not only not a flaw in this movie, it's kinda the whole point.