Zodiac Killer Project is what happens when a director refuses to bin a movie after the rug gets pulled. Charlie Shackleton lost the rights to the source he planned to adapt, Lyndon E. Lafferty’s “The Zodiac Killer Cover-Up: The Silenced Badge,” so he rebuilds the project as a meta essay about how true crime documentaries are made and why they keep seducing audiences. The result is half process lesson, half provocation. It can be sharp. It can also be wearying.
Freed from the usual clip reels and talking heads, Shackleton leans almost entirely on his own voice. The screen fills with spare, slow pans across anonymous California landscapes and a handful of inserts that demonstrate how he would have staged the clichés he now critiques. Gun-barrel close-ups. Shell casings glittering at dawn. Stylized re-creations of panicked nights. The idea is to indict the toolbox while showing it to us. The experience often plays like a true crime podcast with pictures.
There are two valid ways to take it. One reading finds a lucid primer on preproduction, legal clearances, and the seductive logic that turns cold cases into commodity. The other sees a young filmmaker who enjoys hearing himself map the formula he was going to use anyway. Both readings can sit together, which is part of why the film is interesting and grating in equal measure.
I admire that Shackleton did not scrap the work and that he lets the uncertainty into the text. He is candid about what would have been borrowed, and about how those choices risk flattening real violence into mood. The problem is that the self-critique sometimes curdles into a ninety minute throat-clearing. When the visuals stay this minimal and the narration keeps circling, the movie’s pulse drops.
Even so, Zodiac Killer Project lands on its own identity. It becomes a modest essay film about authorship, reenactment ethics, and the audience appetite for neat solutions. It also surfaces a less familiar branch of Zodiac lore through Lafferty’s cover-up theory, sketching the unusual research methods that fed his suspicion. A fishbowl-in-the-trunk episode is the standout sequence, eerie and funny and oddly persuasive about how obsession manufactures its own evidence.
As commentary on the true crime boom, the film has bite. As cinema, it is intentionally austere and frequently inert. The stripped-down approach underscores the point that style can lie, yet it also exposes how little is left when you remove the genre’s seductive surfaces. You understand what Shackleton is arguing. You may wish he argued it with more variety.
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In the end, this is a good documentary and not a great one. It offers food for thought about a form that often gobbles up tragedy and spits out closure, and it adds a few angles on the Zodiac case that I had not seen dramatized. It also feels like background play at times, the kind of movie you can listen to while you mull the ethics it is raising. As a salvage job and a mirror to the true crime machine, Zodiac Killer Project works well enough. As a sustained watch, it comes and goes.
Score: 6/10
Zodiac Killer Project (2025)
- Director: Charlie Shackleton
- Genre: Crime, Documentary
- Runtime: 92 minutes
- Rated: NR
- Release Date: November 21, 2025
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