What would a feature-length director commentary look like when the film was never made? This is the slippery, fascinating conceit of Charlie Shackleton’s rather brilliant Zodiac Killer Project, which finds the director walking through his failed attempt to adapt Lyndon E. Lafferty’s book The Zodiac Killer Cover-Up: The Silenced Badge into the first major documentary on the unsolved case. What emerges, one could argue, is even more intellectually stimulating than the original intentions: a sui generis, often humorous stream-of-consciousness journey highlighting the ever-mounting mass of repeated cliches of various true-crime documentaries and series. Instead of a simple hit piece, however, Shackleton investigates why such familiarity often works on the viewer while ensuring you’ll never watch such a program the same way again.
In the nearly four decades since Errol Morris’ The Thin Blue Line, true-crime media has become an industry unto itself, in large part thanks to the addictive nature of binge-ready streaming series. With data-tracking knowing exactly when a viewer clicks away, the filmmakers behind such series and documentaries have engineered the formula to attain short attention spans to a degree more precisely executed than most serial-killer plans. “The more generic the image, the more effective it is as visual shorthand,” Shackleton notes as he lovingly picks apart various tropes, from soft focus “backtors” (aka actors who are only ever seen walking away from the camera, often in slow-motion) to the reliance on evocative yet nonspecific b-roll to the improbable yet overused swinging lamp during interrogations. Setting Zodiac Killer Project far apart from the likes of a deplorable CinemaSins-esque video essay, thankfully, Shackleton is actually admitting he would employ these techniques for his own documentary, recognizing these clichés are well-worn for a reason.
Those looking to glean new insights into America’s most infamous unsolved serial-killer case will likely come away disappointed––the director never got the rights to Lafftery’s book, which primarily focuses on his evidence for the “true identity” of the killer, so he must carefully tiptoe around any revelations exclusive therein. While he walks through each moment of his failed project, even appearing onscreen doing the recording and speaking with the sound engineer, Shackleton seems to find more pleasure in dissecting the foundations of the true-crime documentary than highlighting any surprises when it comes to the case. “I feel like that is the only saving grace of not getting to make the film, is that we don’t need to retell the story of the Zodiac Killer for the thousandth time,” he says. Unlike a project such as Jodorowsky’s Dune, where one is rather devastated it never came to light, it’s hard to imagine Shackleton’s intended project would’ve actually been all that compelling. This makes his conversational, self-reflexive approach––narration in which he wholly improvises, aside from a few general notes––all the more engaging. He’s not afraid to self-correct when he gets a fact wrong or laugh at something he’s taking a jab at, making one feel like they are in the room with him, captivated to see what trope he’ll tackle next.
There’s, of course, much to get specific about: the peculiar timing of The Jinx’s jaw-dropping reveal, the exploitative nature of Paradise Lost, the ballooning ridiculousness of Making a Murderer, the self-righteousness of Monster: The Jeffrey Dahmer Story. While Shackleton could’ve prodded a bit deeper into the psychological reasons why viewers are so addicted to repeatedly watching stories of heinous crimes, he does touch on the ethically dubious lengths filmmakers will go to prioritize engaging television over any morality concerns. “If you are convinced it’s for the greater good, there are very few ethical lines as far as HBO execs are concerned,” he notes. Never laboring too exhaustively on a single trope, yet feeling comprehensive in the breadth of what’s dissected, Shackleton has crafted an entertaining, even self-deprecating investigation into a global addiction. While there will always be more murders, and thus more series about murderers, in a perfect world Zodiac Killer Project is the true crime documentary to end all true crime documentaries.
Zodiac Killer Project premiered at the 2025 Sundance Film Festival.