A still from Zodiac Killer Project by Charlie Shackleton, an official selection of the 2025 Sundance Film Festival. Courtesy of Sundance Institute.

Zodiac Killer Project Review: Defying the True Crime Algorithm

Sundance 2025

/
8 mins read

Zodiac Killer Project
(USA/UK, 92 min.)
Dir. Charlie Shackleton
Programme: NEXT (World premiere)

 

There have been a surprising number of films about movies that were never made. These meta-films serve as alternate timelines, sometimes considering how movies could have turned out if things had gone a certain way or fallen into place as planned.

2013’s Jodorowsky’s Dune immediately comes to mind, and 2002’s Lost in La Mancha would have been a wonderful exemplar if Terry Gilliam hadn’t almost killed himself while finishing his Quixotic tale, suffering a heart attack a day before its premiere at Cannes only for the result to be soon forgotten. In 1965 The Epic that Never Was looked at Alexander Korda’s failed attempt to bring I, Claudius to the screen, while 2009’s Henri-Georges Clouzot’s Inferno reflected upon the famous French director’s removal from his chance at a big Hollywood production.

Add to this list about movies-about-movies that never were made Zodiac Killer Project, a film-about-a-film filled with meta-analysis that has something unique in contrast to its predecessors. Director Charlie Shackleton’s own project that the rug pulled from under it, and we have the very same filmmaker telling the story of how it was all supposed to be. The result is an absolute delight: a sardonic ouroboros that examines the travails of crafting a true crime drama, but also a stripping away of the very tropes that fuel its popularity.

On paper, Shackleton’s film looks more self-indulgent than magnificent, and one could be reticent to trust a man whose recent project, 2023’s Paint Drying, consisted of a Warhol-esque shot of a white wall of paint drying over ten hours and seven minutes. Clearly a provocateur, this kind of attention-seeking artiness can often be read as nothing more than obnoxious, a tiresome way of making a point rather than actually making something to be engaged with as an audience member beyond the delving into discourse.

So consider me as surprised as anyone to find Zodiac Killer Project to be fantastic. It’s a playful dive into the phenomenally successful subgenre of true crime docs.

From the opening shot of this film, where the voiceover informs us what the opening shot of the other film should have been, we’re treated to a tale that runs in two parallel time frames. One is our understanding of what could have been. The other offers actual shots that reflect what easily could have been cut into the final, unfinished feature.

We are given analyses of the types of characters that embody these films: fuzzy, out of focus characters that recreate specific events but are shot with their faces obscured. According to Shackleton, these glorified extras are called “backtors.” Along with these mysterious characters that traipse through historical events, there are elements like “evocative B-roll,” showing bullet casings dropping to the floor or a short focal-length shot of the barrel of the gun. Peppered throughout, these elements that are so often taken for granted appear increasingly ridiculous when exposed as the hoary tropes that they are, the magic trick ruined by showing how it’s all done.

The brilliance here is how Shackleton mirrors his own film-that-never-was with a wide series of actual successes, particularly those shot over the last decade where the streaming giants (and their subscribed audiences) have gorged on these titles. From Ryan Murphy’s pulpy dramatic series, to dozens upon dozens of other tales of murderers and their victims, Shackleton takes the constituent pieces of these works apart with delightful dexterity. We see the confection broken down to its ingredients, the various elements for such dour subject matters made both surreal and ridiculous when matched up in such precise fashion.

A major work that helped launch the very genre is the Oscar nominated 1996 Paradise Lost, and Shackleton’s mid-film conversation from the sound booth to his recordist about the egregious behaviour of the filmmakers in the under-baked Paradise Lost 2: Revelations was particularly salient, if not a little surreal given I’ve had many conversations in collaboration with co-director Joe Berlinger about this very facet. It’s but one of many acute points of analysis that Shackleton, a former critic, injects into his film, drafting throughout a conversation not only about this subset of often sensationalist crime stories, but also about the entire mechanism of crafting non-fiction on a grander scale.

The result sees Shackleton produce a deeply informative and entertaining audio commentary, the likes of which litter the best of the Criterion Collection and other labels, but in this case is recorded for a film that never was. The truthiness of the tale is constantly being undermined, and I have a feeling one shouldn’t take too seriously that there ever was a film that was going to be made. That’s of course no bother, because the film we get, with its quietly composed images that zoom into details that reveal little, to shots of locations that may or may not be where other events actually took place, makes one feel throughout part of the creation of the film itself, invited to go along for the ride rather than being chastised for wanting to journey in the first place.

As much as this is a work of deep critical analysis, it’s also a blackly comic joy, providing a mischievous masterclass of the shared stylistic choices that make up this subgenre, but also encouraging us to see how they’re often similar slop repackaged to command our attention once again.

On one level, Zodiac Killer Project is just a bit of fluffy fun. On the other, it may well reshape the way one sees films of this nature. It breaks not only the fourth wall, but also the metaphoric fifth or sixth walls of some multidimensional form. Everything is exposed in this wild, thrilling, even goofy vantage point where the very film we’re watching unravels as we witness it.

Zodiac Killer Project premiered at the 2025 Sundance Film Festival.

Jason Gorber is a film journalist and member of the Toronto Film Critics Association. He is the Managing Editor/Chief Critic at ThatShelf.com and a regular contributor for POV Magazine, RogerEbert.com and CBC Radio. His has written for Slashfilm, Esquire, The Toronto Star, The Globe and Mail, The National Post, Screen Anarchy, HighDefDigest, Birth.Movies.Death, IndieWire and more. He has appeared on CTV NewsChannel, CP24, and many other broadcasters. He has been a jury member at the Reykjavik International Film Festival, Calgary Underground Film Festival, RiverRun Film Festival, TIFF Canada's Top 10, Reel Asian and Fantasia's New Flesh Award. Jason has been a Tomatometer-approved critic for over 20 years.

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