The Zodiac Killer Project

“The Zodiac Killer Project” is the ultimate test case of what whether the movie imagined is better than the movie made. Because when director Charlie Shackleton lost the rights to California Highway Patrol Officer Lyndon E. Lafferty’s 2012 true-crime book, “The Zodiac Killer Cover-Up,” right before he was about to begin filming a documentary based on it, rather than call the whole project off, he improvised and made something else instead. What emerged is not all that interested in The Zodiac Killer himself, whoever that may or may not have been. When Shackleton’s producer impresses upon him from off screen the need to provide basic details about the serial killer terrorizing California in the seventies, Shackleton laughs and says he’d rather not. It’s not him evading pertinent details but rather demonstrating what he has decided in his new project will be deemed pertinent, and by shrugging off the constraints to which such movies are typically bound, “The Zodiac Killer Project” is one of the fortunate few that is in effect, set free.

Shackleton’s approach is to show locations he had scouted and planned to use for dramatic re-creations of Lafferty’s book while the scenes that would-have-been in voiceover as he had conceived them by using the record of Lafferty’s private investigation as culled from other sources than his book to avoid legal entanglements. In doing so, he probes true crime clichés (deploying familiar sound effects of the genre so relentlessly that they assume a laugh-out-loud comical quality) and how those clichés are utilized to manipulate us, but more than that, by working through the film he wanted to make, he probes his own artistic intentions. And if “The Zodiac Killer Project” demonstrates the spell true crime holds over us, occasional moments when Shackleton wistfully mourns just how good a certain scene might have been, he can’t help but reveal himself as being under its spell too, so much so that I am not quite sure he knows the movie he made is probably better than the one he imagined.