A scene from Zodiac Killer Project.Supplied
Zodiac Killer Project
Directed by Charlie Shackleton
Classification N/A; 92 minutes
Opens at Toronto’s Hot Docs Cinema Nov. 21
Charlie Shackleton is no stranger to exploring the internal workings and boundaries of film form. The British director, critic and multimedia artist continues his work of (de)constructing narratives from the formal margins with his newest feature documentary, Zodiac Killer Project.
With Shackleton’s previous work having categorically explored distinct film genres (2014’s Beyond Clueless traces teen movies from the mid-’90s to mid aughts; 2015’s Fear Itself focuses on horror cinema and is almost entirely comprised with clips from the genre’s filmic output), Zodiac Killer Project is an organic extension of the filmmaker’s preoccupation with tracing the formal and narrative frameworks of the movies we love.
Part-personal confession, part-genre takedown, Shackleton’s newest essay film – a blend of documentary and authorial subjectivity – is a self-aware autopsy of the film he couldn’t make: a true crime adaptation of The Zodiac Killer Cover-Up: The Silenced Badge written by Lyndon E. Lafferty.
A retired California highway patrol cop, Lafferty believed he knew the identity of Zodiac killer – the infamous and still unidentified serial murderer who terrorized San Francisco’s Bay Area in the late 1960s – and, despite never being able to convince his law enforcement peers to seriously consider his lead, remained dogged in his years’ long obsession with his own self-identified main suspect.
The set-up of Zodiac Killer Project is disarmingly simple: long, often static shots of vacant Bay Area landscapes accompanied by Shackleton’s surprisingly intimate, often wry voiceover describing the film he would have made had he been able to secure the rights to Lafferty’s book.
The filmmaker – working triple duty here as narrator and editor – moves the unravelling of his now-abandoned true crime adaptation into a sharp critique of the genre itself, tracing the rote motifs and narrative structures of the mode alongside critique of the form’s ethical missteps and coercive deceptions.
It’s a meta, pointed, sometimes tender (and, other times, tedious) takedown of the spectacularization of violence and muddy moral ground that defines contemporary true crime storytelling. Now fully folding himself into the subject of his film, Shackleton describes the structure of his proposed Zodiac doc as formally and narratively aligned with the myriad examples of true crime media he criticizes in the film (output from streaming giant Netflix takes a particularly large hit).
It’s here where the ambiguities of the Zodiac Killer Project arise. Taken at face value, the movie he would have made sounds indistinguishable from the genre he now critiques from a moral and artistic vantage point: heavy-handed re-enactments, ethically shaky leaps of logic, the seductive pull of a “second” true crime narrative trying to outdo the first.
At one point, he admits that if an investigative detail of Lafferty’s didn’t quite add up, he and his team probably “would’ve taken it out in the interest of making the film more convincing.” It’s one of many self-indicting statements that lands like a confession and a punchline at the same time.
And there lies the rub at the heart of Zodiac Killer Project: Shackleton’s own clear awareness of his proximity to the exact tropes he’s likewise so sharp at skewering. If we’re to take his self-reflexive storytelling in good faith, the impact of Shackleton’s excavation is dulled by the sense that the director, in many ways, wants to have his cake and eat it too – a feeling that is underscored by what feels like his own disbelief in the choices he would have made had his original project been realized.
It’s a kind of filmmaking that toes the line of self-awareness, existing in the rhetorical purgatory between cleverness and indulgent self-regard.
The film is a self-conscious intellectual exercise more than anything; a reminder of Shackleton’s 2023 ten-hour protest film, Paint Drying, shot in 2016 as a challenge to British film censorship and the costly BBFC classification process. Consisting entirely of a static view of white paint drying on a brick wall, the winking critique of Paint Drying takes a firm and expansive rooting in Zodiac Killer Project – here, Shackleton himself is not exempt from his own fascination with the spectacle of the genre.
What remains is an interesting, if too often overly protracted, portrait of creative frustration, artistic ego and the ethics of storytelling in an overly saturated landscape. It’s Shackleton’s most personal film to date, even though it’s about something that doesn’t exist. Or maybe that’s why it feels personal – here he is finally interrogating not just formal convention, but his own desire to fit into it.
In the end, Zodiac Killer Project isn’t trying to redeem true crime or even offer up a politically just takedown of its many ethical issues (despite appearances to the contrary). Instead, it asks viewers to sit with the absurdity of a genre that claims to seek truth while constantly bending, refracting and distorting it for its own means. It asks who, if any of us, filmmakers and viewers alike, can claim innocence in that exchange.
Special to The Globe and Mail