SXSW '25: Zodiac Killer Project is Too Focused on Its Own Failure to Be Great

There’s no creative person in history who has been able to make every single project they’ve ever cared about. All art is built on itself; paint splashed on paint, words and phrases reused and remixed in later works—the failures stack into success, even if that success is only that a project gets to exist at all. Every artist in history has their “What if?” project, that beautiful perfect bubble of an idea that almost came into existence exactly the way it should have. Not every artist has the chance to make a piece of art explicitly about that loss.

In Zodiac Killer Project, which had its Texas Premiere at SXSW in 2025, director Charlie Shackleton gets to exorcise that demon by making an entire documentary about his own failed documentary. After securing funding and nearly completing pre-production for a project adapting The Zodiac Killer Cover-Up: The Silenced Badge by Lyndon E. Lafferty, the estate backed out, leaving the project in limbo and Shackleton adrift. His response was to strip the documentary format down as far as it would go, using constant narration (his own) over long shots of California rest stops, homes, and town streets instead of the flashy reenactments you might recognize from most true crime documentaries. When he does use reenactments, it’s almost deliberately cheesy, pulling the viewer back from engaging fully sincerely with the story and drawing attention to the fact that they’re watching a film about a film that will never exist.

It’s a metafictional flourish that occasionally hits a unique and satisfying register, especially when Shackleton describes the more generic tricks of true crime documentaries that are so often deployed. When he points out which shots always work for certain moments or the sheer ubiquity of what feels like the exact same credits sequence for a dozen different tv shows, the film feels like watching a magician explain his tricks. There is a certain glee felt by an audience when a magician shows exactly how he’s fooling you even as he fools you again.

Moments of “realism,” like when the narration over a long shot over a quiet intersection is interrupted by Shackleton urging the viewer to check out a motorcyclist doing a wheelie, creates a kinship with the viewer. In these scenes, it feels like listening to a friend telling a good story—and Shackleton is a good storyteller. There is a nice sense of pacing to the film, and the asides and tangents are entertaining and welcome. By being forced into using only information that can be gleaned from public domain sources rather than the first-hand account of the copyright-protected author, Zodiac Killer Project becomes a thornier and, at times, more interesting project than it ever could have been in its original conception.

Unfortunately, these moments come sandwiched between repeated interjections that “this scene would have worked so well” and “You can see it, right? It would’ve been great.” Shackleton’s despair at having “wasted” so much of his time on a project that will never see the light of day is inseparably connected to the film that was actually made, but those hurt feelings sometimes overwhelm the more intriguing narrative he stumbled into. To put it bluntly, I don’t believe that “it would have been great,” especially when the story inevitably builds toward its own anticlimax. It’s not a spoiler to say that a California Highway Patrol officer you’ve never heard of did not, in fact, catch the Zodiac Killer. The story Shackleton adapted could never have had the explosive ending that it needed, no matter how many true crime genre tricks he deployed. By focusing so much on the imagined perfection of a non-existent project, the film loses focus on its own best qualities. Rather than imagining a better version of Shackleton’s Zodiac Killer project, I found myself wishing that he’d made a better version of his Zodiac Killer Project, one more focused on why he wanted to make the film in the first place. It’s never fully clear what about Lafferty’s book so compelled him to invest so fully into pre-production or what the film’s existence would’ve meant for him. Was it just that he knew he could do better than (or at least as good as) the true crime docs already on streaming services? Was it the tragedy of a man who wasted his life chasing a killer, who likely never even had the right man in his sights, that appealed to Shackleton? I don’t know, and it doesn’t feel as if the film or filmmakers know, either.

It turns what could’ve been a great film into a good film, its own shortcomings (purposefully? Accidentally?) becoming so much more glaring than whatever shortcomings his original project would have had. Moments where Shackleton draws a parallel between his own obsessive pre-production planning and Lafferty’s hunt for the zodiac killer hints at a much more interesting and thorny movie. There’s a version of this film more cutting to the true crime genre, more honest about Shackleton’s own desires and frustrations, more sure of itself and committed to its own premise. To borrow the director’s own words, “You can see it, right? It would’ve been great.”

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