‘Zodiac Killer Project’ is a Meta-True Crime Documentary with Unfulfilled Potential [Sundance 2025 Review]

Chad Collins   |  

Jan 27, 2025

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I’ve never been a huge fan of true crime. Before I understood what media literacy meant—before I understood that media broadly yields meaning, not all of it reasonable—my reluctance to dive into the inner workings of whatever serial killer or cold case was hot at the moment had less to do with ethics and more to do with a matter of taste. I simply… didn’t care for it. The content was undoubtedly upsetting, though as a matter of form, there was very little about the filmic interpretation of real tragedy that mandated viewing. Charlie Shackleton’s documentary Zodiac Killer Project has similar thoughts in its mind. However, as often as it pierces the veil of true crime culture, it regresses—perhaps intentionally—into the same banal exploitation.

The long and short of Shackleton’s anti-true crime yet still true crime doc has to do with one Lyndon E. Lafferty, a former California Highway Patrolman turned Zodiac Killer truther. Lyndon’s novel retelling, The Zodiac Killer Cover-Up, was optioned by Shackleton and his team, though just as pre-production had wrapped, the rights were rescinded. What’s a documentary filmmaker supposed to do? How about making a documentary about the documentary?

At its best, Shackleton’s scathing insights of true crime culture and form damn an entire industry of violence. Regularly, Shackleton walks viewers through Lyndon’s story, sharing what, at any given point, he’d have done as a filmmaker to augment Lyndon’s convictions. The artifice of an entire currency—and true crime is its own currency today—is interrogated. Locations are often fake; the tropes are deceptive—ominous guitar twangs, every small town ever hiding a dark side—and, really, the matter of guilt or innocence, Shackleton concedes, would have been his to orchestrate.

Was George Russell Tucker, as availed by Lyndon, really the Zodiac Killer all along? Shackleton says no, though had he been able to make his documentary, he boasts how easily he could have convinced us he was, how fluidly he could have vindicated Lyndon’s admittedly out-there theories. It’s all very talky, often little more than establishing shots with Shackleton’s voiceover, a kind of podcast retrofitted to the filmic form.

That uneasy marriage proves initially compelling and long-term exhausting. Shackleton doesn’t have much to say beyond what audiences likely already know. True crime is exploitative and manufactured—it’s all entertainment. As a speaker, he’s immediate and, quite regularly, hilarious. He’s easy to listen to, making some shallower incisions cut deeper than they might have otherwise. As a 90-minute commitment, however, it’s the same thesis again and again… and again.

And perhaps it was all part of the larger point, though, in dismantling Lyndon’s credibility. Shackleton commits the same sin he seems eager to indict. At its conclusion, having heard tales of fishbowls and ominous drives home, the suggestion, broadly, is that Lyndon was unwell, a man so feverishly committed to this one suspect that he dedicated decades of his life to the ostensible pursuit of justice, but just aggrandized his ego. Maybe Lyndon wasn’t all there. Reviews of his novel online seem to suggest a proclivity for conspiracy. However, as much as Zodiac Killer Project wants us to discard the authority of true crime filmmaking, it seems to revel in those conclusions by its end.

Fascinating in form and inceptively genius, Zodiac Killer Project is ultimately a mixed bag. Shackleton is an engaging host, and the pivot from true crime antics to artifice is, at least, structurally interesting. At its end, however, this meta-exercise in what could have been ultimately bears the weight of its conceit—as the credits rolled, I wanted to watch the original documentary, and I’m not sure that was the point.