Zodiac Killer Project
Zodiac Killer Project
6.786%
Against the backdrop of deserted spaces, a filmmaker explores his abandoned Zodiac Killer documentary, delving into the true crime genre's inner workings at a saturation point.
Kevin Ward reviewedJuly 1, 2025
Had heard some buzz about The Zodiac Killer Project, but wasn't exactly counting down the days to watch Shackleton walk us through the ghost of the movie he didn’t get to make. And yet—it kind of rules. What initially feels like a director’s commentary on a film that never was morphs into a shrewd and often scathing anatomy of the true crime genre, laying bare the tropes with the precision of someone who knows the beats too well.
It’s compelling in that it doesn’t just deconstruct—it self-immolates. Shackleton sometimes laughs outright at the rote playbook he once seemed ready to follow, or maybe felt obligated to follow. That laughter, pointed as it is, carries a strange self-awareness, occasionally shading into something closer to disdain. The film sometimes veers so hard into critique that it risks undercutting itself entirely. And it makes you wonder—if he’s this skeptical of the machinery, what does that say about the director who once sought to be its operator? This is, after all, the guy behind Paint Drying—yes, that Paint Drying. That film was not actually conceived to be the de facto Letterboxd message board as it is now. It was actually made solely because Shackleton knew if he submitted it to the British film rating agency, that they HAD to watch all 10+ hours of literal paint drying in its entirety. Knowing that, you start to wonder how much he ever actually wanted to make a Zodiac film in the first place. Was he sincere once and got disillusioned? Or was he always more interested in the meta-narrative—the story about the story—than the story itself?
In any case, what’s left isn’t so much an unfinished film as a sharp object pointed back at the hand that held it. And the fingerprints on it? Very much Shackleton’s.