Zodiac Killer Project is, put simply, a strange undertaking. Charlie Shackleton’s expansively stripped-down documentary emerged from a thwarted attempt to adapt Lyndon E. Lafferty’s 2012 memoir The Zodiac Killer Cover-Up: AKA The Silenced Badge, the rights to which Lafferty’s estate suddenly withdrew during pre-production. The finished product is an equal parts doleful and playful gesture toward a project that never was. Shackleton cheekily tip-toes through loopholes of legality, and along fine lines between homage and parody, description, and enactment, relaying various facts of the case that were made available through copyright-free sources — and testing the limits of what he can pull directly from the book — as he vividly describes his original vision for a full-blown true-crime doc.
The sprawling, paranoid book chronicles a Highway Patrol cop-turned-vigilante-detective’s decades-long investigation of a single suspect (given the pseudonym George Russell Tucker) with whom he shared an unnerving encounter in a rest stop parking lot. In a passage that Shackleton quotes directly, Lafferty describes a gaze of incomparable evil beaming through Tucker’s car window, and a tensely prolonged moment of eye contact that sent the former careening away in his vehicle with the latter’s license plate number scrawled on a notepad. Once Tucker’s photo was held up next to the official police sketch of the infamous killer, the idea of his guilt was firmly rooted in Lafferty’s mind. Thus began the man’s all-consuming mission to prove the veracity of this notion, which Shackleton assures us he would have presented in a way that closely aligned the audience with the author’s self-confirming investigative techniques.
The project Shackleton describes is diametrically opposed to the one unfolding before us; roving, glacial pans escort the viewer through evocative locations in the American Southwest, which would have served as a backdrop for various fragmented reenactments. Shackleton’s extended and exacting account of what could have transpired in these spaces is underscored by creeping, ominous zooms toward patches of scenery that threaten to swallow the frame whole. The movements are punctuated with insert shots that bring his words to life, both illustrating and embodying the intended effects of the scenes he’s describing. In the opening scene, Shackleton references the true-crime documentary’s inexorable tendency toward the “rhythm of drama,” and spends the rest of Zodiac Killer Project’s runtime dissecting the artifice and fakery inherent to that genre while also deploying some of its stagiest tropes in order to imbue his film with a dramatic tempo.
It’s an engrossing and provocative case of having cake and eating it too, since Shackleton derives just as much evident pleasure from suggesting, and fabricating, suspense as he does from puncturing it; many sequences reach a droning climax and are immediately undercut by the filmmaker’s laughter. His breathy giggles are wielded for a wide range of effects, sometimes taunting, sometimes endearing, and sometimes outright unsettling. Shackleton’s omnipresence puts him front and center as both mediator and subject, but his film handily sidesteps the navel-gazing that this formal gambit might initially suggest. Zodiac Killer Project refuses to settle comfortably into tidy categories, tones, or perspectives. At first blush, it’s a lively conversation between an artist and a set of aesthetic principles, but the modes and methods of delivery are constantly revealing knottier substrates below the surface. It suggests just as much as it describes, and leaves an imaginative viewer to run wild with those ideas while also giving them the tools to examine the darker places those impulses come from. It’s a love letter written with a poisoned pen.
Published as part of First Look 2025 — Dispatch 1.
Comments are closed.