Lost in America
By Chris Shields
Zodiac Killer Project
Dir. Charlie Shackleton, U.S./UK
Zodiac Killer Project screened March 15 at Museum of the Moving Image as part of First Look 2025.
The conceit of Charlie Shackleton’s Zodiac Killer Project is that it’s not a film at all but an explanation of a film that could have been. The premise is this: Shackleton had hoped to make a film based on California Highway Patrol Officer Lyndon E. Lafferty’s 2012 true-crime book The Zodiac Killer Cover-Up (aka The Silenced Badge), which details the author’s years-long investigation and pursuit of the serial killer of the title. Lafferty’s story is a compelling one. He believes he once encountered the killer at a rest stop, and, regretting that he let him get away, devotes his life to capturing him. What Lafferty discovers in the course of his investigation is a possible conspiracy, a wily suspect, and the possibility that he might never resolve his unfinished business with the killer. Yet Shackleton was unable to secure the rights to the book. Instead, the filmmaker presents a carefully constructed roadmap of what his film would have been. Shackleton’s film is structured around a series of minimalist landscape shots. Each shot was captured on half a roll of 16mm film which times out to approximately five minutes on screen. Over this footage Shackleton narrates, adding cheeky inserts and cutaways from time to time to humorously lay out what might have been while also deconstructing the familiar and exploitative tropes of the true-crime documentary genre itself.
Shackleton has a history of taking novel and reflexively critical approaches to his films. Beyond Clueless (2014) is a documentary about teen movies that uses footage from 200 films, and Fear Itself (2015) is similarly constructed almost entirely from horror film footage. The Afterlight (2021) organizes shots featuring actors who are no longer alive performing similar actions from a variety of international films, placing them one after another to create a sort of index of cinematic difference and sameness. That film was both an experiment in taxonomy, not unlike Shackleton’s previous films, and a hauntingly poetic work. Shackleton emphasizes his film’s material ephemerality by adding another key layer: an external mandate by the filmmaker that The Afterlight will only exist as a single 35mm film print that will not be digitized. It will erode over time until it no longer exists. To see the film, one must be lucky enough to catch a theatrical screening. A choice (or constraint) like this is what makes Shackleton an experimental artist as much as a documentarian.
Shackleton’s new film is also formally daring, but its somber tone is replaced by a more comic one. As we see shots of California landscapes and buildings, Shackleton gently intones his one-step-removed commentary about what role a given shot would have played in the film. He’s disappointed and wistful for what could have been, but he’s also laughing at himself and his chosen form. When a particular aspect of the true-crime genre must be elucidated, he provides several examples from other documentaries, clearly poking fun at their sameness. Shackleton’s voiceover interrogates these familiar images (light bulbs, blood, montages of news footage and b-roll), humorously asking why and how they seem to achieve a certain effect. At one point we see a shot of a sunset as Shackleton again tells us how this image would have functioned. He then makes sure to tell us they would not have used a sunset shot so distractingly beautiful.
Shackleton’s film plays something like Marguerite Duras’s The Lorry (1977). In Duras’s film, she and actor Gérard Depardieu read a script for a film that was never made, accompanied by a selection of somewhat banal (and, as in Zodiac Killer Project, meditative) shots that seemingly fill things out visually. Duras’s film explores a similar territory to Shackleton’s in inquiring where the creative act of bringing words and ideas to the screen actually happens. Like Shackleton’s film, it is a work of imagination, one that explicitly asks for a workspace in the viewer’s mind. Both films require invigorating mental labor from their viewers. By refusing to provide a closed, verisimilitudinous narrative package, however, the film asks its audience to question the very nature of narratives, of artifice, of truth, fiction, and the mechanisms artists use to achieve their ends.
Whereas Duras’s film is an almost entirely melancholy affair, the comic position that enlivens Zodiac Killer Project’s ridiculous conceit feels closest to Albert Brooks's self-aware deconstructions. Brooks is the master of self-serving, perverted logic, and although more minor key, there is a fair bit of this in Zodiac Killer Project. As Shackleton explains the film he would have made, he’s careful not to come too close to his originally intended source material—he even cites his lawyer—making sure to only use facts that appeared somewhere outside of Lafferty’s book. This kind of hubristic exploitation of a technicality provides an intentionally cheap loophole that smacks of Brooks’s 1979 comedy Real Life or his 1975 meta-comedy album A Star Is Bought. And like Brooks does in his own self-reflexive movies, Zodiac Killer Project takes this joke to its furthest end in unexpected and inventive ways to cast a sharp critical eye on the form Shackleton has chosen to lampoon.
His film functions as both a compelling true-crime narrative and a formal deconstruction of one. Lafferty’s relationship with the Zodiac Killer is of the cat-and-mouse variety, and Shackleton’s film conveys the excitement of the officer’s revelations and near misses throughout his investigation. While the filmmaker shows and tells us exactly how he would achieve his aims, laying the artifice bare in his sheepish Brechtian fashion, he is also wrapping us up in the author’s story, his tireless, frustrated mission. Despite its radically deconstructed nature, Zodiac Killer Project still retains the morbid appeal of its more conventional referent. It’s a dazzling achievement where form eloquently rhymes with the inconclusive nature of its source material. Lafferty never caught the killer, but in his own way, made peace with this. Shackleton didn’t get the rights to Lafferty’s book, but he made a film nonetheless.