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Towards the end of Jafar Panahi’s 2011 masterpiece “This Is Not a Film,” a roiling but playfully self-reflexive iPhone documentary the Iranian director shot within the confines of his own apartment while under house arrest for his supposed crimes against the regime, there’s a moment where Panahi appears to forget himself as he describes the narrative feature he intended to make before his arrest. He can picture it so clearly in his mind’s eye that it’s as if he’s already seen the final cut — as if he’s describing a memory to us, as opposed to an unrealized dream. And then, abruptly snapping back to reality with such a brutal dramatic punch that it almost feels scripted in advance, Panahi all but swallows his own tongue. “If we could tell a film,” he says with poisoned disdain, “then why make a film?”
It’s a rhetorical question, but also one that Panahi already seems to be in the process of answering by the time that he asks it. Or maybe it would be more accurate to say that it’s a question he isn’t really asking to begin with, as “This Is Not a Film” is very much a film indeed — and not just any film, but a profoundly emotive Brechtian exercise in which the absence of “cinema” begins to assume an imagistic power all its own. The documentary truth of Panahi’s situation is gradually subsumed into the artifice of its construction (and vice-versa), until the only thing we know for certain is that “This Is Not a Film” says more about life under totalitarian rule than whatever the Iranian government had prevented him from making in the first place.
It’s great. You should see it. “Zodiac Killer Project” director Charlie Shackleton sure has. Like Panahi, the British artist and critic (“Beyond Clueless,” “The Afterlight”) found himself in a position where he was abruptly denied the chance to make a film that he could already envision from start to finish. Like “This Is Not a Film” before it, “Zodiac Killer Project” sees its director leveraging their misfortune into an impish and hyper-resourceful attack on the oppressive strictures of modern storytelling (in this case the rigid conventions of the true-crime genre rather than the mandates of a censorious regime), one that allows Shackleton to achieve a measure of freedom through the act of detailing his own cage. And, as was the case with its most obvious point of reference, the non-film that Shackleton has rescued from the jaws of erasure is almost certainly more rewarding than the one he was originally hoping to make.
Truth be told, the most fundamental difference here is that the film Shackleton originally wanted to make sounds like it would have been, how to put this nicely… bottom of the barrel Netflix crap. To the point that it’s hard to believe an artist as innovative, smart, and self-aware as Shackleton could have ever convinced himself otherwise. Then again, perhaps that’s a testament to the power of a good story to override your critical faculties and obscure the pursuit of truth — true-crime is a hell of a drug, and it sure wouldn’t be the first time that someone investigating the Zodiac murders got a little ahead of the skis.
It’s also possible to read “Zodiac Killer Project” as a botched attempt at selling out, a career move that might have been easier said than done for the sort of filmmaker whose previous feature was deliberately intended to exist on a single 35mm print, so that it will erode with each screening until it ceases to exist altogether (whatever its virtues, “The Afterlight” wasn’t the kind of thing that put Hollywood streamers on notice). Shackleton isn’t shy about the fact that he wanted to make something people actually watched, which is how he wound up bumbling around the arid foothills of Vallejo in preparation for a documentary adapted from Lyndon E. Lafferty’s “The Zodiac Killer Cover-Up: The Silenced Badge.”
A self-published book written by a former member of the California Highway Patrol, Lafferty’s feverish account makes the argument that the most infamous unsolved murders in American history were committed by some guy who glared at him at a rest stop one night — some guy who the powers that be were conspiring to protect for mysterious reasons. It’s an eccentric and compelling new perspective on a crime spree that has already been covered to death on both page and screen alike (although curiously not in documentary form), and Shackleton was itching to make it into the next “Making a Murderer” or “The Staircase.” The itch was strong enough that Shackleton couldn’t shake the idea, even after he lost the rights to Lafferty’s book. He would just have to tell Lafferty’s story without his face, or his words, or any of the proprietary details that couldn’t be traced back to another source.
And so the movie that Shackleton made opens on a long and static shot of an empty parking lot as the director’s disembodied voice — a wry and lilting thing — tells us “If we had made the film, there would’ve been a car here.” The camera slowly zooms in and out at nothing as Shackleton talks us through the night when a man named George Russell Tucker pulled up beside Lafferty in that very spot one night in the mid ’70s. Shackleton’s narration seems to betray an eye-rolling lack of enthusiasm, especially as he makes fun of the fact that every true-crime doc they make these days starts with a scene just like this, and yet the filmmaker can’t help but get carried away by how effective he could’ve made this material. “Fuck, it would’ve been good” he chuckles to himself after hilariously ripping apart the copy-paste tropes of the genre’s title sequences for several minutes on end. But this isn’t a true-crime documentary, of course, and so “Zodiac Killer Project” simply introduces itself with some white text against a black screen.
From start to finish, Shackleton’s semi-improvised voiceover manages to sustain a credible self-belief in his unmade project even while he makes it sound like it would have been a total surrender to the template; even though talking through the genre’s conventions without actually showing them only helps to expose how shallow they really are. He introduces George Russell Tucker with requisite ominousness, only to deflate all the tension as he explains why serial killers always seem to have three names (it has to do with the media wanting to specify one George Tucker from another). He undercuts the most redolent snippets of “evidence” by laughing at the concept of “evocative B-roll,” and sabotages the story of Tucker’s initial arrest by letting us know that the police station we’re looking at is actually a library. The scene continues after a cut to the interior of a building, where Shackleton drills a bit deeper into the details of the case. Is it the same building? Without the voice of God to tell us otherwise, it’s amazing how fast our eyes see what they already think they’re looking at.
Without access to any of the story’s main characters, or permission to shoot in many of its actual locations, most of the shots in “Zodiac Killer Project” are defined by an increasingly palpable absence, as Shackleton lingers on James Benning-like images while describing all of the things he didn’t have permission to put them (the ultra-effective choice to photograph these empty spaces on 16mm film lends the whole film the ominous texture of an old driver’s ed. video). And yet, poking fun at the true-crime formula has the curious effect of underscoring its power, as we can feel our investment in the details of Lafferty’s DIY investigation — which snowballs to involve a superteam of amateur sleuths — deepen despite the complete lack of visual evidence. Like detectives searching for clues, our eyes scan each frame as if there’s something to find, even though Shackleton’s voice is always there to assure us that we’re not even looking at the scene of the crime.
Curiously, the film only becomes edge-of-your-seat suspenseful after Shackleton pops up on camera for a moment about halfway through the movie, as if to illustrate why he remained so compelled by this story even though he could see right through it. The true crime genre is a self-perpetuating machine that takes care of itself, and while “Zodiac Killer Project” is too tongue-in-cheek to explicitly draw any sweeping conclusions from that (about the stories we tell ourselves, the narrative basis of our justice system, or even the complicated legacy of “The Thin Blue Line,” though there’s enough meat on the bone for viewers to chew on all of those subjects and more), the film does get at the one question the the rest of its ilk wouldn’t dare to ask their audience: Is the genre predicated upon facts and dependent upon form, or dependent upon facts and predicated upon form? And that question naturally begs another, one that Shackleton can’t stop himself from asking to himself with a laugh: “How many people are ever going to watch this?” Not many, I’d venture to guess, but I suspect that everyone who does see this film — or this not film, as it were — will have to stifle a laugh of their own the next time they sit down to watch some chart-topping miniseries about an unspeakable murder in a small town.
Grade: B
“Zodiac Killer Project” premiered at the 2025 Sundance Film Festival. It is currently seeking U.S. distribution.
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