ZODIAC KILLER PROJECT

The paradox of Charlie Shackleton’s film is that it exists but also doesn’t exist. The story sounds somewhat Charlie Kaufmanesque: Shackleton set out to adapt a fringe novel about the Zodiac Killer investigation—The Zodiac Killer Cover-Up, highway patrolman Lyndon E. Lafferty’s nakedly self-aggrandizing account of his decades-long pursuit of a red herring—but he lost the rights to the book at the last minute. So instead of his intended by-the-numbers Zodiac Killer project, we get Zodiac Killer Project, a curious hybrid documentary where Shackleton meditates on his passion project while defiantly navigating loopholes in copyright law to tell as much of Lyndon’s sordid tale as he is legally allowed, and then some. What he has created is a revelation, a brilliantly meta movie that collapses the distance between investigative procedural and experimental essay film, canny adaptation and affectionate parody, podcast and cinema. Beautifully shot on location in Villejo—with staged scenes that take their cues from classic Errol Morris as well as structuralist Michael Snow—charmingly chill, and sometimes thrilling in spite of itself, Shackleton has snatched victory from the jaws of defeat and salvaged a truly original Zodiac movie: a tragicomedy about obsession, artistic persistence, and escaping the true crime hall of mirrors. ~OO