“Zodiac Killer Project,” the fascinating feature documentary from director Charlie Shackleton, is nothing like what it sounds. For one thing, it’s not really about the infamous Zodiac Killer — though neither really was the David Fincher film either. Instead, both are about something much better and wholly unexpected. Following Shackleton’s failed attempt to make a movie about a man who suspected he knew who the actual Zodiac Killer was, this doc is just as good as Fincher’s film in how it cuts to the core of something deeper while remaining a vision all its own.
The failure that set the film in motion was due to a rights issue, but Shackleton had already planned out how he would have made his movie. So, not to let that go to waste, he decides to show us, taking us meticulously through, almost beat by beat, what this would have looked like. The result is a film that’s not just funny, skewering so much of the lazy yet still effective tropes of so much of true crime, but also a wake-up call for the genre.
This all opens with footage of one of the locations that would have begun this story. With Shackleton narrating over what looks like any other nondescript parking lot, we hear of an encounter between two men where one of them believes that the other certainly looks like the Zodiac Killer. This plays like a thriller where you can hear the excitement creeping into the director’s voice before he explains that this will now never be something he can depict how he intended. His original vision is now merely an unrealized dream, but this is infinitely more interesting anyway.
“Zodiac Killer Project” then becomes a experimental meditation on the often unspoken challenges of filmmaking, the pain that comes from a project falling apart after you spent so much time on it, whether one can really have true integrity in one’s art, and, most centrally, a deconstruction of the cinematic language of true crime. This is something Shackleton has a deep understanding of and demonstrates for us in delightful detail. The film shifts into being a work of criticism in its own right by becoming something of a video essay where we see just how much of the sludge of shallow true crime content falls back on the same old tricks.
Seeing all the examples of trickery, manipulation, and just straight-up laziness cut together, taking big-name titles from Netflix’s “Making a Murderer” to HBO’s “The Jinx” to task, is as entertaining as it is sharp. It is in Shackleton’s withering breakdowns that we begin to see how easily true crime projects can become bankrupt creative endeavors.
At the same time, the director does not let himself off the hook. If anything, he is indicting his own work as part of this, frankly sharing how he too would have used these very same tricks if he had the chance. The frankness with how all this is presented and how he speaks about it makes the documentary an enthralling one, even as you’re primarily just hearing someone talk. It’s like we’re being given some sort of secret code that, once you see it, will forever change how you look at all these projects.
This turns it into not just a film that is built for our moment, where the inundation of true crime is reaching a breaking point, but one that throws down the gauntlet for filmmakers to be more thoughtful in how they go about making these works. It’s something that will resonate most with fans of true crime films and shows.
This extends to one of the most surprising and hilarious endings of any film that showed at Sundance this year. It’s abrupt and yet still precisely pointed, providing one more lasting impression that you won’t be able to shake. It cements Shackleton’s film as not just one of the most fascinating achievements of the form in recent memory, but a work that has the potential to rewire our very brains free from the malaise of true crime manipulation in the air.
“Zodiac Killer Project” is a sales title at Sundance.
