Zodiac Killer Project

The result is even better than his initial design: a sharp, hilarious, self-aware, and acutely insightful work of both celebration and critique.

While there’s a sense that the thesis here lacks originality, there are enough audiovisual flights of fancy to keep the cheeky intellectual jiggery-pokery ticking along nicely.

This is not the first documentary to deal with thwarted creative ambitions. It may, however, be the one that most effectively and entertainingly cocks a snook at the very fates that conspired in the first place.

The film Shackleton wanted to make clearly wasn’t a passion project coming from his deepest soul. It’s not like he’s Orson Welles yearning for the unfairly butchered “Magnificent Ambersons.” “Zodiac Killer Project” is fairly thin in both conception and execution, but it is very much “my kind of thing,” particularly his dry, humorous tone. He makes a good and entertaining guide.

What remains is an interesting, if too often overly protracted, portrait of creative frustration, artistic ego and the ethics of storytelling in an overly saturated landscape. It’s Shackleton’s most personal film to date, even though it’s about something that doesn’t exist. Or maybe that’s why it feels personal – here he is finally interrogating not just formal convention, but his own desire to fit into it.

It is a deconstruction of genre and a meta story of failure from which the director salvages a teaspoonful of success.

Unable to make his ideal documentary about the Zodiac Killer due to a rights issue, Shackleton breaks down the movie he might have made in painful detail that reveals a shocking lack of self-awareness, systematically dismantling the genre without an ounce of introspection.