Vague Visages’ Zodiac Killer Project review contains minor spoilers. Charlie Shackleton’s 2025 documentary on Amazon features himself, Guy Robbins and Lee Nicholas Harris. Check out the VV home page for more film criticism, movie reviews and film essays.

How does a filmmaker move on from a cancelled project? In the case of English director Charlie Shackleton, he chose to philosophize about his failed adaptation of Lyndon E. Lafferty’s 2012 book The Zodiac Killer Cover-Up: The Silenced Badge and the formulaic structure of true crime productions in modern pop culture. The 91-minute film frequently takes aim at streamers who gobble up gory productions that Netflix recycles in different forms; however, the doc is more of a psychological study about one man’s need to make sense of his “internal logic.” Zodiac Killer Project is an outlier in the world of true crime documentaries, as Shackleton shows little to no interest in solving one of the world’s most infamous murder mysteries.

“What is life if not accepting the chaos of reality and the mysteries at the heart of human existence?” This is just one of Shackleton’s numerous poetic statements in Zodiac Killer Project. The documentary begins in a parking lot as the director establishes the inciting incident for his failed adaptation, in which a California Highway Patrol officer (Guy Robbins as Lafferty) comes face to face with a murder suspect (Lee Nicholas Harris as Tock) whom he subsequently investigates for years, hoping to confirm the true identity of the Zodiac Killer. Shackleton, who doesn’t appear on camera until halfway through the film, seems inspired by Lafferty’s “cinematic” prose and ability to maintain suspense, even when the late cop/author had just one source to work with: himself. Structurally, Zodiac Killer Project is quite simple. Working with cinematographer Xenia Patricia, Shackleton executes slow zoom-ins and zoom-outs on various locations, which in turn creates a hypnotic effect as he narrates about the structure of his shelved film while demonstrating how true crime documentaries follow trends in their use of “evocative b-roll.” To use the director’s words, he sets up “everything and nothing” by contrasting his own failures with those of Lafferty, all the while refusing to explain the specifics of the Zodiac mystery.

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One of the key components of Zodiac Killer Project is a proposed conspiracy from The Zodiac Killer Cover-Up: The Silenced Badge. In short, Lafferty claims that various colleagues believed Tucker to be the Zodiac Killer, and so he intended to prove their theory by entrapping the suspect. But from Shackleton’s perspective as a director, he can only imply certain information due to the legal consequences of calling people out. Ultimately, it’s becomes evident that the English documentarian relates to Lafferty’s failed investigative quest, evidenced by his recurring narration about the source material’s “exquisitely tragic” descriptions. Shackleton frequently jokes about “evocative b-roll” techniques in Zodiac Killer Project, but he always brings the audience back to a place of realism, most notably when addressing true crimes series that prioritize violence and gore before ending with photo grids of murder victims — an approach that the director describes as “sudden moral righteousness.”

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With Zodiac Killer Project, Shackleton highlights various truths about the human condition by confronting the lies that we tell ourselves while binging true crime productions. Sometimes, said lies seem tiny and irrelevant when comparing one’s self to both killers and their victims. A friend once told me that he watched a true crime documentary and skipped over various interview sequences that seemed boring. Is that a cinematic crime? Or is it a coping mechanism that says more about the viewer than the true crime production itself? In Zodiac Killer Project, Shackleton finds clarity via cinema by stripping the true crime phenomenon down to its core essentials, ugly as they may be.

Zodiac Killer Project screened in New York at the IFC Center on November 21, 2025.

Q.V. Hough (@QVHough) is Vague Visages’ founding editor. Thank you for reading film criticism, movie reviews and film essays at Vague Visages.

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