‘Zodiac Killer Project’ review: Frustrated filmmaker dives into meta-therapy

In Charlie Shackleton's essayistic bric-a-brac, The Zodiac Killer Project, no mystery is solved, but the true crime genre itself is certainly exposed and interrogated as a prime suspect. On the other hand, there's nothing quite like the tweezer-like focus of an obsessive person—either trying to solve a maddening case or watching a show about them on Netflix—to put our dark yearnings for fulfillment on sickening display while simultaneously enjoying the little things.

Shackleton, a British director with an avant-garde sensibility, was poised to create his own opus based on the investigative speculations of a Vallejo policeman who believed he had uncovered the identity of a criminal. infamous zodiac killer who terrorized the Bay Area in the late '60s, taunting police with letters and cryptograms, and was never caught. Shackleton's fascination with former Highway Patrol officer Lyndon Lafferty's speculative memoir, Covering Up the Zodiac Killer, which details years of efforts to bring his pinpoint suspect to justice in the face of an alleged conspiracy, led to a fight over the rights. When that failed, another film project emerged.

Consisting of original footage and the director's voiceover, The Zodiac Killer Project is a chalk sketch of his missing and presumed dead documentary. Shackleton explains his conceptual framework through long shots of serene, sunny places in Vallejo: an empty parking lot, a church, an intersection, a house in the woods. We hear what a perfectly planned re-enactment he would have set there – or, since these are not necessarily the locations in Lafferty's narration, and Shackleton is just an honest man, filmed in a similar location.

In some ways, what we're watching is a wittily sad presentation of the Errol Morris homage that never was, with inserts that we learn are called “evocative” (a swinging lamp overhead, a gun in someone's hand), shots that are meant to be artfully inserted alongside his imagined interviews with key participants. Shackleton, who can be seen on camera in the studio where he performed his narration, knows that his acting breaks and thematic beats are known.

Yet his abandoned venture is also a mischievous explosion of storytelling format, a knowing critique of the long-standing stereotypes of this most in-demand genre: creepy credits, montages and musical cues. Don't expect a republication of the Zodiac case or the parts of Lafferty's book that he is legally barred from talking about. Get ready for some fun takes on popular documentaries like “Making a Murderer” And “Jinx” and also simultaneously moralizing and exploitative “Monster: The Jeffrey Dahmer Story.”

Of course, Shackleton is also an openly passionate connoisseur of these titles, and it is sometimes difficult to tell from his glib tone whether he is pointing the finger at himself or pining over the abandonment of a club he clearly wanted to join. This can leave the recurring “Zodiac Killer Project” with a shallow aftertaste to match its spiciness. But the year has seen a valuable rethinking of how we process crime stories – through eye-opening documentaries. “Predators” And “Perfect Neighbor” to Caroline Fraser's deeply researched book “Murderland” Shackleton's view remains an intriguing and worthy provocation regarding our cultural bloodthirstiness.