“Zodiac Killer Project”, the fascinating functional document from director Charlie Shackleton, is nothing it sounds. For one thing it is not really about the infamous star murder – although none of them really were David Fincher Film either. Instead, both are about something much better and completely unexpected. After Shackleton’s failed attempt to make a movie about a man who suspected he knew who the actual Zodiac Killer was, this doctor is as good as Fincer’s film in how it cuts to the essence of something deeper while he remained a vision completely.
The failure that put in the film was due to a matter of rights, but Shackleton had already planned how he would have made his movie. So in order not to let it go to waste, he decides to show us, take us carefully, almost beat by beat, what this would have looked like. The result is a movie that is not only funny, skewer so much of the lazy but still effective tropes of so much of real crime, but also an alarm clock for the genre.
Everything opens with pictures of one of the places that would have started this story. With Shackleton tells about what looks like any other parking lot without description, we belong to a meeting between two men where one of them thinks the other really looks like Zodiac Killer. This plays like a thriller where you can hear the excitement crawl into the director’s voice before he explains that this will never be something he can portray how he thought. His original vision is now just an unrealized dream, but it is still infinitely more interesting.
“Zodiac Killer Project” then becomes an experimental meditation about the often countless challenges with filmmaking, the pain that comes from a project that falls apart after you spent so much time on it, if you can really have real integrity in your art, and most Central, a deconstruction of the cinematic language for real crime. This is something that Shackleton has a deep understanding of and demonstrates for us in delightful detail. The film shifts to be a criticism in itself by becoming something of a video thesis where we see how much of the sludge of shallow real criminal content falls back on the same old tricks.
Seeing all examples of trickery, manipulation and just straight the latency cut together, take large naming titles from Netflix ”To make a killer“To HBO’s”Jinxen“To the task is as entertaining as it is sharp. It is in Shackleton’s wilted divisions that we begin to see how easily true crime projects can become bankrupt’s creative efforts.
At the same time, the director does not release himself from the hook. If anything, he points out his own work as part of this, and frankly how he would have used these the same tricks if he had the chance. The sincerity of how all this is presented and how he talks about it makes the documentary a captivating, even if you mainly only hear someone talk. It is as if we get some kind of secret code that, when you see it, will forever change how you look at all these projects.
This turns it into not only a movie built for our moment, where the flood of real crime reaches a breaking point, but one that throws down the blade for filmmakers to be more thought -provoking in how they go to do these works. It is something that will reason most with fans of real crime films and shows.
This extends to one of the most surprising and funny endings of all the films that showed Sundance this year. It is suddenly and yet exactly pointed, which gives a more lasting impression that you will not be able to shake. It cements Shackleton’s film as not only one of the most fascinating achievements in the form of the latest memory, but a work that has the potential to switch our many brains free from the Malaisen of real criminal manipulation in the air.
“Zodiac Killer Project” is a sales title at Sundance.
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