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Zodiac Killer Project Brilliantly Deconstructs Our Obsession With True Crime
A work of criticism as well as a work of art, Charlie Shackleton’s sly film is nebulously sinister and dryly hilarious all at once.
So, instead of his intended reenactments and interviews and creepy montages, the director now narrates his tale over deserted streets, anonymous storefronts, empty living rooms, random churches that might have once been locations for his pseudo-narrative. He also tells us what he’s giving us: the cutaways to police sketches and tables full of files; traveling shots of highways and hills; slow, menacing zooms into empty streets; and of course the close-ups of hands and feet and eyes and tape recorders, all that so-called “evocative B-roll” that marks so much true crime. We’re charmed by the evidence of our own manipulation, but we also become aware of how these clichés we’ve come to know and love create meaning — how guilt can be spun out of thin air, and how the demands of narrative will always supersede the messy nature of truth, be the venue a theater screen, the so-called boob tube, or life itself.
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