Some years at the film festival I manage to see everything I want to see. There are a bunch of titles that I will get around to.
Between work and volunteering at the festival, my options were limited. Thankfully, this film turned out to be worth it.
When I was in my teen/early twenties, I would periodically binge documentaries about serial killers. Part of the impulse was terror that such people existed in the world. A more mercenary reason was I was looking for ideas for screenplays.
Over time, this interest declined.
These stories mostly boil down to weak men picking on people on the outskirts of society. Related to this, the format of the story was always the same - framed through a lens of the killer, turning the victims from human beings into statistics, set pieces in the killer’s story.
This documentary is aware of true crime’s appeal and dances with it, weaving between dissecting the genre while also recreating what his project would have been.
Every time the in-movie starts to come together, Shackleton pulls the rug out - showing the power of the genre’s conventions while simultaneously critiquing them.
Winking but never smug, the key to the film’s success is that Shackleton is aware of his own obsession with his failed project, puncturing himself every time it feels like he is lurching toward self-importance.
A thought-provoking, darkly humorous look at the way we attempt to impose a sense of narrative and meaning onto the human experience, The Zodiac Killer is worth a look.
No comments:
Post a Comment