'Zodiac Killer Project' pursues a doc never made, revealing a filmmaker's own obsession

No enigma is solved successful Charlie Shackleton’s essayistic doodad “Zodiac Killer Project,” but the true-crime genre itself is surely staked retired and interrogated similar a premier suspect. Then again, there’s thing similar the tweezer absorption of an obsessive — either trying to ace a maddening lawsuit oregon devouring shows astir them connected Netflix — to enactment our darker yearnings for fulfillment connected queasy display, portion reveling successful minutiae astatine the aforesaid time.

Shackleton, a British filmmaker with an avant-garde sensibility, was each acceptable to marque his ain opus, based connected the investigative musings of a Vallejo bull who believed he’d discovered the individuality of the infamous Zodiac slayer who terrorized the Bay Area successful the precocious ’60s, taunting constabulary with letters and cryptograms, ne'er to beryllium caught. Shackleton’s fascination with erstwhile road patrol serviceman Lyndon Lafferty’s speculative memoir “The Zodiac Killer Cover-Up,” which details a years-long quest to bring his pinpointed fishy to justness successful the look of a perceived conspiracy, led to a bid for the rights. When that fell through, a antithetic movie task emerged.

Composed of archetypal footage and the director’s conversational voice-over, “Zodiac Killer Project” is the chalk outline of his missing and presumed dormant documentary. Shackleton explains his conceptual model for it implicit agelong takes of serene, sunny Vallejo locations: an bare parking lot, a church, an intersection, a wooded house. We perceive what perfectly designed re-creation helium would person mounted determination — or, since these aren’t needfully the sites specified successful Lafferty’s communicative and Shackleton is thing if not honest, filmed astatine a spot conscionable similar it.

In 1 sense, what we’re watching is simply a wittily rueful transportation league for an Errol Morris-style homage that ne'er was, flecked with inserts we larn are called “evocative b-roll” (the swinging overhead lamp, the weapon successful someone’s hand), shots meant to beryllium artfully slotted alongside his imagined interviews with cardinal participants. Shackleton, glimpsed connected camera successful the workplace wherever helium vamped his narration, knows his enactment breaks and thematic beats.

And yet his abandoned undertaking is besides a mischievous detonation of a storytelling format, a knowing critique of this most-wanted genre’s longstanding tropes: the eerie recognition sequences, montages and euphony cues. Don’t expect a rehash of the Zodiac case, nor the parts of Lafferty’s publication helium can’t legally speech about. Settle successful for immoderate amusing dissections of fashionable docuseries similar “Making a Murderer” and “The Jinx,” arsenic good arsenic the simultaneously moralizing and exploitative “Monster: The Jeffrey Dahmer Story.”

Of course, Shackleton is an openly avid connoisseur of those titles too, and it’s sometimes hard to discern from the glibness of his code whether he’s pointing the digit astatine himself oregon pining implicit rejection from a nine helium intelligibly wanted to join. That tin permission the occasionally repetitive “Zodiac Killer Project” with a shallow aftertaste to spell with its smarts. But successful a twelvemonth that’s seen a invaluable rethink of however we process transgression stories — from the eye-opening documentaries “Predators” and “The Perfect Neighbor” to Caroline Fraser’s profoundly researched publication “Murderland” — Shackleton’s position is inactive an intriguing, worthy provocation regarding our taste bloodlust.