Sundance review: 'Zodiac Killer Project' scrutinizes the true-crime documentary genre, taking apart the genre's cliches and why the audience expects them

For his sake and ours, it’s a good thing director Charlie Shackleton didn’t get to make the movie he planned to make about the Zodiac Killer — because instead of making yet another true-crime documentary, he made an insightful dissection of the genre with his “Zodiac Killer Project.”

Shackleton — who is the movie’s director, editor and narrator — explains that he had been working on a movie about the infamous California serial killer of the 1970s, based on a memoir by Lyndon Lafferty, a former California Highway Patrol officer who said he spotted someone he thought was a likely suspect in the five known homicide cases. Shackleton had already started pre-production work when he got an email informing him that Lafferty’s family had declined to sell the film rights to the memoir.

The film opens with a long camera pan across a rest stop off of a California freeway. The camera stops at an empty parking space, and Shackleton narrates the opening shot he was planning to do — showing a CHP police cruiser parked in that same spot, seeing a car pulling up alongside. Shackleton describes how Lafferty, in the cruiser, makes eye contact with the driver of the other car, who resembles the familiar police sketch of the suspected Zodiac Killer.

Shackleton repeats this trick throughout the film (and it is film — the pan shots employ 16mm stock), showing us the general idea of the kind of scene he intended to film. Those shots, he says in the narration, would have been recreations of key moments Lafferty wrote about. Usually, the locations are simulated, too; he often mentions that the house or church he’s filming are the real locations of the events Lafferty’s book mentions. (Shackleton also quotes just enough of the book to stay on the legal side of the “fair use” defense. He also gleans enough of what’s in Lafferty’s book from outside sources to cover a fair amount of it without violating copyright.)

These scenes that never were, Shackleton tells us, each fit neatly into the formula of true-crime documentaries — from the enigmatic credits through the scene-setting of the small town with a dark secret. To demonstrate, Shackleton compiles montages of other true-crime shows from HBO and Netflix that use those same techniques.

With “Zodiac Killer Project,” Shackleton’s failed attempt at joining the true-crime pantheon — one that sounds pretty average, based on his description — instead takes apart the cliches of the genre, and the audience’s expectations behind each of them.

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‘Zodiac Killer Project’

★★★1/2

Screening in the Next program of the 2025 Sundance Film Festival. No more in-person screenings are scheduled. Online screenings available through Sunday, February 2, 11:55 p.m. Mountain time. Not rated, but probably PG-13 for mature themes involving a serial killer. Running time: 92 minutes.