‘Zodiac Killer Project’: Sundance Review

Dir. Charlie Shackleton. USA/UK. 2025. 92 mins

This is not the first documentary to deal with thwarted creative ambitions. It may, however, be the one that most effectively and entertainingly cocks a snook at the very fates that conspired in the first place. The fates, in this case, came courtesy of the family of Lyndon E. Lafferty, the author of ’The Zodiac Killer Cover-Up’, a.k.a. ’The Silenced Badge’. Director Charlie Shackleton had been set to adapt the book into a true crime documentary, until Lafferty’s estate abruptly withdrew the rights. Shackleton’s response was to create a film about the film he wanted to make, skewering the tropes of the true crime genre in the process and cheekily and ingeniously sidestepping the rights issue. 

 Intellectually agile and experimental exercise

What’s unexpected here is not Shackleton’s playful approach to exorcising the blow to his plans, but that he would have wanted to make something as hackneyed as a true crime documentary in the first place. Shackleton has previously been more interested in interrogating the conventions of a genre – horror in Fear Itself; coming of age movies in Beyond Clueless, etc – than in following them.  As such, this intellectually agile and experimental exercise, with its very British tone of affectionate ridicule towards the tropes of true crime filmmaking, feels so on brand that it’s hard to believe that another version of the film – one which ticked every genre cliché box going – ever existed in the filmmaker’s head.

This an engaging, off-beat journey through the landscape of creative disappointment, with Shackleton as a very likeable guide. It is one of the filmmaker’s more accessible and commercial projects (although given that he once made a ten-hour censor-baiting film of paint drying, that’s all relative); the picture’s appeal should extend beyond the festival circuit following its Sundance NEXT premiere, and it could find a home with a specialist distributor or curated streaming platform.

The struggle to realise a filmmaking vision has provided rich material for documentary filmmakers over the years. Notable examples include Keith Fulton and Louis Pepe’s Lost In La Mancha, an account of Terry Gilliam’s ill-fated first attempt to make The Man Who Killed Don Quixote, or the self-explanatory Jodorowsky’s Dune, by Frank Pavich. Shackleton’s film is different in that he has been able to take a project that was seemingly wrenched out of his hands, and craft it into something new and highly original.

Shackleton himself is the film’s central character, delivering a loose-limbed, riffing performance piece about the film he envisioned. The original project was intended to closely follow Lafferty’s account of his suspicions and pursuit of the man he believed was the Zodiac Killer, as detailed in his book. Fortunately for Shackleton, Lafferty was rather promiscuous with these ideas, and shared them extensively in the media, meaning that the project could, to a certain extent, circumvent the rights issue.

Over footage of shots of potential locations in and around Vallejo, in California’s Bay Area, Shackleton tells the story of the film he wanted to make. That the monologue is unscripted adds to the appeal: on some occasions, Shackleton starts to laugh, on others, he cracks jokes with, one assumes, the sound engineer. All of this is interspersed with what Shackleton describes, in true crime parlance, as “evocative B-roll” – little atmospheric cut away shots of smouldering cigarettes and granite-faced cops. Plus there are extensive clips from true crime films and series, from seminal examples such as Making A Murderer, The Jinx and the Paradise Lost films to less celebrated ventures.

While there is gentle mockery in Shackleton’s examination of the filmmaking techniques, what’s crucial to the film’s tonal success is that he is a fan and aficionado of the genre – someone who appreciates the true crime formula, even as he takes fond potshots at it.