ZODIAC KILLER PROJECT reviewed by Alfie Tiplady

Charlie Shackleton's meta-documentary ZODIAC KILLER PROJECT is as much a personal grappling with a failed project as it is a critique of the true crime genre.

From the beginning, Shackleton’s dry, unassuming narration makes it clear to the viewer that the film they are watching is not the one he initially set out to make. Having intended to adapt the book The Zodiac Killer Coverup, a true crime account by California Highway Patrol Officer Lyndon E. Lafferty, about his investigation into a suspect in the Zodiac killings case, the director was hit by a major stumbling block partway through production, when Lafferty’s estate withdrew from the deal and the project fell through. 

What follows is at once a narrational musing on what the unrealised film would have been, and equal parts a scrutinising dissection of the filmmaking mechanics underpinning much of the true crime genre. Over lushly saturated shots of Californian landscapes, highways and suburban locales, intercut with a slew of familiar true crime inserts (the clinking of bullet cases, the opening of case files), Shackleton walks us through how he would have staged various reenactments of the more dramatic episodes in Lafferty’s obsessive pursuit of his suspect.  

The film guides us through a string of clichés inherent to the genre - from the seemingly trademark true crime “country-inflected” intro music, to the introductory audio clips that helpfully provide a neat summation of the key elements of the case, for the contemporary viewer perhaps with “one eye on their phone.” Shackleton peels back layer upon layer of deceptive techniques, revealing at one moment how he, himself, would have deliberately left it ambiguous whether Lafferty’s voice over was the real man’s voice or an actor’s, as well as detailing how footage of a stand-in house was opted for over the real home of Lafferty’s suspect on account of the real house being insufficiently creepy.   

It is difficult not to notice the imposing contradiction at the heart of ZODIAC KILLER PROJECT, that Shackleton appears to have set out to make something adhering to the very same manipulative techniques he is implicitly critiquing; arguably however this fundamental contradiction is what makes the film a fascinating watch. 

The film walks an intriguing tonal balancing act between Shackleton’s off-the-cuff presentation and the shadowy subject matter - at its most successful it is able to lurch from the director’s informal musings into moments of genuine dramatic intensity simply by utilising a change in narrational tone, a brooding, droney soundtrack and some purposefully gradual zoom shots of static landscapes. Perhaps most impressive is Shackleton’s ability to signify the manipulative nature of true crimeisms whilst simultaneously engaging in them, at once highlighting the artifice within what so often purports to be documentary, whilst wringing out sustained, dramatic tension through the most simple of filmmaking elements.