Zodiac Killer Project review – true crime critique rescues aborted documentary

The Guardian

28-01-2025

If Laurence Sterne made a true-crime documentary it might resemble this exasperating, sometimes negligible but also often amusing and rather insightful personal work from British film-maker Charlie Shackleton. It is a deconstruction of genre and a meta story of failure from which the director salvages a teaspoonful of success. Shackleton recounts his abortive attempt to make a film about the Zodiac serial killer, who murdered at least five people in the San Francisco Bay Area without being caught, and whose case is still open. It was also the subject of a movie by David Fincher.
Shackleton intended to adapt a book entitled The Zodiac Killer Cover-Up: The Silenced Badge by Lyndon E Lafferty, a former California highway patrol cop who died in 2016. Lafferty believed he knew the identity of Zodiac. He once witnessed someone at the wheel of a car behaving suspiciously, who at one stage engaged in a weird stare-out contest with Lafferty in a car-park. Serious criminals are often caught through minor traffic violations so, following a hunch which was to turn into a lifelong obsession, Lafferty recovered a photo of the car's owner using the licence plate and it resembled the police photofit of the Zodiac's face.
But despite decades of sleuthing and covert surveillance, he never amassed evidence firm enough to persuade law enforcement to follow his lead. He was ordered to drop the case by his infuriated superiors – which Lafferty considered evidence of a cover-up but may just have been their fury at his timewasting. Lafferty later suffered the indignity of his work being mocked in the more authoritative book by Robert Graysmith.
Shackleton had what he thought was the go-ahead from Lafferty's family to adapt his book. He did research, he scouted locations, he incurred expenses – but then they suddenly changed their minds and said he couldn't proceed. Why? Shackleton thinks it could be down to a more lucrative deal from Netflix or someone similar, or maybe they didn't like the line Shackleton was taking. Perhaps they suspected he was going to emphasise the tragicomedy of Lafferty's failure and didn't want him emerging as the David Brent of the Zodiac conspiracy community.
Instead, Shackleton shows us the kind of movie he would have made, almost scene-by-scene, using long static shots of empty locations and his own wry voiceover, with information in the public domain so that he doesn't get sued for copyright. (This is a familiar move for Shackleton, whose collage films Beyond Clueless (2014) and Fear Itself (2015) used short clips under the 'fair use' rule.)
I couldn't help wishing that Shackleton had simply cut his losses and gone on to another project that he could have made properly. However, this one is interspersed with very amusing comments on all the cliches and mannerisms of the true crime genre: the grimly downbeat opening titles, the procedural-fetish small lettering for the credits, the hackneyed Super-8 footage to indicate the killer's smalltown upbringing, the gloatingly presented crime-scene photos and, hilariously, the almost supernatural confidence of the real-life cops who speak on camera. These moments are very funny and interestingly researched; Shackleton is very shrewd on The Jinx, Andrew Jarecki's true-crime streamer from 2015, and the way that it was able to withhold crucial facts about guilt until the season finale without getting into trouble. Without this critique, Zodiac Killer Project really would be very thin. Even so, it's a bit slender but diverting nonetheless.
Zodiac Killer Project screens at the Sundance film festival.