Review: 'Zodiac Killer Project' pursues a doc never made, revealing a filmmaker's own obsession
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No mystery is solved in Charlie Shackleton’s essayistic doodad “Zodiac Killer Project,” but the true-crime genre itself is certainly staked out and interrogated like a prime suspect.Then again, there’s nothing like the tweezer focus of an obsessive — either trying to crack a maddening case or devouring shows about them on Netflix — to put our darker yearnings for fulfillment on queasy display, while reveling in minutiae at the same time.Shackleton, a British filmmaker with an avant-garde sensibility, was all set to make his own opus, based on the investigative musings of a Vallejo cop who believed he’d discovered the identity of the infamous Zodiac killer who terrorized the Bay Area in the late ’60s, taunting police with letters and cryptograms, never to be caught.
Shackleton’s fascination with former highway patrol officer Lyndon Lafferty’s speculative memoir “The Zodiac Killer Cover-Up,” which details a years-long quest to bring his pinpointed suspect to justice in the face of a perceived conspiracy, led to a bid for the rights.When that fell through, a different film project emerged.Composed of original footage and the director’s conversational voice-over, “Zodiac Killer Project” is the chalk outline of his missing and presumed dead documentary.
Shackleton explains his conceptual framework for it over long takes of serene, sunny Vallejo locations: an empty parking lot, a church, an intersection, a wooded house.We hear what perfectly designed re-creation he would have mounted there — or, since these aren’t necessarily the sites specified in Lafferty’s narrative and Shackleton is nothing if not honest, filmed at a place just like it.
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