Amanda Knox was a victim of a terrible miscarriage of justice when Italian authorities tried to frame the American exchange student for the death of her British housemate, Meredith Kercher, in 2007. Not only was she falsely convicted of the killing, but the press also caricatured her as “Foxy Knoxy” – cynically portraying her as a sexually manipulative young woman who traded murderously on her looks.
Given everything she has been through, it is understandable that she would wish to take control of the narrative – as she did with a 2013 memoir and now with the drama, The Twisted Tale of Amanda Knox (Disney+).
But while Knox is justified in wanting to give her version of events and achieve closure, she has been badly advised in putting her name to this bizarrely whimsical drama, which lurches from silly to distressing and which owes a disconcerting debt to the fanciful chamber-pieces of Wes Anderson.
The Twisted Tale shows its hand early on. A cold open finds Knox (Grace Van Patten) returning to Perugia to confront the prosecutor who secured her initial conviction (in the front seat is Sharon Horgan, playing Knox’s mother).
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“Let’s not go back…” Van Patten says in voiceover. “Well, maybe we’ll go back a little.” So begins a bizarrely playful revisiting of her past – filmed with crazy angles and a frothy tone, even as it touches on the birth of Kercher and the divorce of Knox’s parents. It is spectacularly odd. You can only imagine its effect on the family of Meredith Kercher, whose sister Stephanie said she found it difficult to understand how the show “served any purpose”.
Amanda Knox: My Search for Meaning
The Twisted Tale of Amanda Knox does settle down though. The scene in which Knox and her boyfriend Raffaele Sollecito (Giuseppe De Domenico) learn of Kercher’s death is gruelling and upsetting. But the series never gets outside of Knox’s head and everything is told from a rather eccentric perspective (very different from her authorial voice in her book).
Knox became notorious at a time when the media had declared open season on young women. This was the era when newspapers, blogs - and us, the media-consuming masses – laughed at Britney Spears and her obvious mental health struggles and sneered at Lindsey Lohan. But this was hardly the first generation to be so treated. The Twisted Tale of Amanda Knox is co-produced by Monica Lewinsky, another woman who knows what it’s like to go through a public witch trial. Meanwhile, an early scene is soundtracked pointedly by Sinéad O’Connor’s Mandinka.
[ Italian city in Amanda Knox case wants to move on. A new TV series won’t let itOpens in new window ]
A lot is going on here; The Twisted Tale of Amanda Knox has serious things to say about the public humiliation of women. But the quirkiness is offputting and ill-judged. For many, it will surely prove a deal-breaker.
The Twisted Tale of Amanda Knox is on Disney+ now.
