NZIFF Review: The Zodiac Killer Project
I highly recommend this to anyone who wants to get an insight into the mind of a filmmaker, whether you're into true crime or not.
Want a 90-minute true crime podcast with cinematic visuals to go with it? Then look no further, because The Zodiac Killer Project is here. Having been denied the rights to Lyndon Lafferty's book The Zodiac Killer Cover-Up after months of preparing to make true-crime documentary adaptation of it, Charlie Shackleton voices over parts of his B-roll footage, mainly discussing what would be happening and how he would go about showing it to the audience.
His narration is quite meta, as he discusses various true crime conventions and pokes fun at them, such as the location of the crimes being described as "peaceful [...] but it had a dark side". It also makes you question how ethical the genre itself is, as he touches on a series of events that unfolded with the trilogy Paradise Lost, which set up the narrative of an innocent but unusual man as a murder suspect in an unsolved murder case. The makers of true crime documentaries, Shackleton himself included, go out of their way to create various engaging shots to make their works entertaining, which often results in deviating from the truth, even just a bit, or, in the case of the Netflix Jeffery Dahmer series, a lot, as discussed in the movie. Which also raises the question: Is it possible to ethically consume the true crime genre?
Something I personally found quite interesting was how calm the movie was in comparison to typical true crime documentaries. The typical true crime documentary would have lots of cuts, and pensive background music, creating tension in the audience, but in contrast, the Zodiac Killer Project mainly consists of a lot of still shots, and aside from Charlie Shackleton's voiceover, and a singular note that plays each time to indicate a re-enactment shot, there isn't really any other sound that's included throughout to evoke tension. The movie, in this sense, ends up being a letter to the true crime genre.
I highly recommend this to anyone who wants to get an insight into the mind of a filmmaker, whether you're into true crime or not.
