‘Zodiac Killer Mission’ is a Mediocre Meta-True Crime Doc [Sundance Review]

I’ve by no means been an enormous fan of true crime. Earlier than I understood what media literacy meant—earlier than I understood that media broadly yields that means, not all of it affordable—my reluctance to dive into the inside workings of no matter serial killer or chilly case was scorching in the intervening time had much less to do with ethics and extra to do with a matter of style. I merely… didn’t take care of it. The content material was undoubtedly upsetting, although as a matter of type, there was little or no concerning the filmic interpretation of actual tragedy that mandated viewing. Charlie Shackleton’s documentary Zodiac Killer Mission has comparable ideas in its thoughts. Nonetheless, as typically because it pierces the veil of true crime tradition, it regresses—maybe deliberately—into the identical banal exploitation.

The lengthy and wanting Shackleton’s anti-true crime but nonetheless true crime doc has to do with one Lyndon E. Lafferty, a former California Freeway Patrolman turned Zodiac Killer truther. Lyndon’s novel retelling, The Zodiac Killer Cowl-Up, was optioned by Shackleton and his staff, although simply as pre-production had wrapped, the rights had been rescinded. What’s a documentary filmmaker alleged to do? How about making a documentary about the documentary?

At its greatest, Shackleton’s scathing insights of true crime tradition and type rattling a whole trade of violence. Frequently, Shackleton walks viewers via Lyndon’s story, sharing what, at any given level, he’d have carried out as a filmmaker to reinforce Lyndon’s convictions. The artifice of a whole forex—and true crime is its personal forex at this time—is interrogated. Places are sometimes pretend; the tropes are misleading—ominous guitar twangs, each small city ever hiding a darkish aspect—and, actually, the matter of guilt or innocence, Shackleton concedes, would have been his to orchestrate.

Was George Russell Tucker, as availed by Lyndon, actually the Zodiac Killer all alongside? Shackleton says no, although had he been capable of make his documentary, he boasts how simply he might have satisfied us he was, how fluidly he might have vindicated Lyndon’s admittedly out-there theories. It’s all very talky, typically little greater than establishing photographs with Shackleton’s voiceover, a form of podcast retrofitted to the filmic type.

That uneasy marriage proves initially compelling and long-term exhausting. Shackleton doesn’t have a lot to say past what audiences probably already know. True crime is exploitative and manufactured—it’s all leisure. As a speaker, he’s instant and, fairly often, hilarious. He’s simple to hearken to, making some shallower incisions reduce deeper than they could have in any other case. As a 90-minute dedication, nonetheless, it’s the identical thesis time and again… and once more.

And maybe it was all a part of the bigger level, although, in dismantling Lyndon’s credibility. Shackleton commits the identical sin he appears wanting to indict. At its conclusion, having heard tales of fishbowls and ominous drives residence, the suggestion, broadly, is that Lyndon was unwell, a person so feverishly dedicated to this one suspect that he devoted many years of his life to the ostensible pursuit of justice, however simply aggrandized his ego. Possibly Lyndon wasn’t all there. Opinions of his novel on-line appear to counsel a proclivity for conspiracy. Nonetheless, as a lot as Zodiac Killer Mission needs us to discard the authority of true crime filmmaking, it appears to experience these conclusions by its finish.

Fascinating in type and inceptively genius, Zodiac Killer Mission is in the end a combined bag. Shackleton is an interesting host, and the pivot from true crime antics to artifice is, not less than, structurally attention-grabbing. At its finish, nonetheless, this meta-exercise in what might have been in the end bears the burden of its conceit—because the credit rolled, I wished to look at the unique documentary, and I’m undecided that was the purpose.

Tags: Sundance 2025 True Crime True Crime Documentaries Zodiac Killer Mission

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