The true crime genre’s ubiquity is driven by people’s endless fascination, disgust, and—bizarrely—search for comfort in genre conventions that still have the ability to generate complex emotions despite their predictability and familiarity.

Having tried and failed to make a documentary about the infamous Zodiac Killer, filmmaker Charlie Shackleton walks the viewer through what his film would have been like and why, using Bay Area landscapes, reenactments, film and TV clips, and voice-over. In this wholly original, self-aware cinematic work, a filmmaker chews over what might have been and playfully probes the inner workings of a genre at saturation point.