ZODIAC KILLER PROJECT

One can not fault Charlie Shackleton for wanting to continue a film he couldn't make: a true crime documentary spun from The Zodiac Killer Cover-Up: The Silenced Badge, by CHP officer Lyndon Lafferty. After the rights to the book were spontaneously withdrawn by the writer's family, the adaptable Shackleton spun his work into a sketch-like description of the movie he woulda made, constructed largely with evocative B-roll footage of the sunlit California suburbs within which the Zodiac Killer lurked, archival photographs, and Shackleton's own probing narration. Shackleton expands the film to include consideration of the tropes of true crime, and an examination of our obsession with the genre. The film aspires to meta asit considers how many of the stylistic tics of the genre have become cliches, and how inevitably Shackleton may have deployed them on his own project. 

But this very quickly reaches the tiresome level of a stranger enthusing about the project he didn't make, and becomes downright risible each time Shackleton congratulates himself with "pretty good, isn't it?" after describing a climactic point in his narrative (a certain tongue-in-cheek feeling makes these statements no less irritating). Shackleton's previous project, The Afterlight, was a wordless collection of film clips from movies whose actors are no longer with us, and we quietly form our own attachments to these people, and the narratives suggested by their respective film clips. Existing as a single 35mm print, The Afterlight is only screened with the filmmaker present. One feels watching this current film that Shackleton is quick to manage his audience's perceptions of his material (since he can't be present at every screening), and the movie winds up deeply inhibited by Shackleton's over-present approach. As evocative as the photography becomes, at no point does Shackleton let us connect the dots or envision the movie ourselves, and his gestures toward micromanagement of his audience's responses become infuriating.