Two things need to be borne in mind about The Twisted Tale of Amanda Knox, a new true crime drama. The first is that Knox and Monica Lewinsky – both members of “The Sisterhood of Ill Repute”, as Knox has described them in the past – are executive producers of the show. The second is that the family of Meredith Kercher, the 21-year-old British exchange student with whose murder Knox and others were charged in 2007, were not involved in the series. Her sister Stephanie said last year to the Guardian: “Our family has been through so much and it is difficult to understand how this serves any purpose.”
To the first point: it is undoubtedly true that the subject of The Twisted Tale is Knox and her survival of an extraordinary and extraordinarily awful experience, and while not hagiographic, it is not a warts-and-all profile either. Then again, how much warts-and-all can there be for an ordinary 20-year-old excited to be studying abroad – in Perugia, Italy – for the first time? If you set aside the salacious narrative built up around her by a rabid press and fuelled by the preconceived prosecutorial notions around the crime, that is what she was.
To the second: the grief of the Kercher family, and their enduring loss, is a terrible thing. But the purpose of the series is clear – to show how this particular miscarriage of justice took place and, by implication, how different forces, prejudices and appetites can combine to bring them about in general. It is designed to give the lie to the appealing notion that justice is always blind and its administrators are always beacons of rectitude, shining light into the darkness of depraved people’s souls.
Over the course of eight dense and often extremely tense episodes, writer KJ Steinberg (best known for This Is Us) maps out Knox’s long journey from first arrest for her flatmate’s murder to eventual exoneration, via wrongful conviction, four years in prison and multiple trials. The outlines of the case are probably remembered by many of us of an age to have followed the headlines and articles that proliferated at the time, and the series does a good job of illustrating each pivotal point as it arises (the initial misstep in establishing the time of death, for example. Similarly, the misinterpretation of the English phrase “See you later” as meaning definite plans to meet had been established between Knox and her initially co-accused, Patrick Lumumba, reminiscent of the very British “I popped him on the bed” expression misconstrued by a US audience in the Louise Woodward trial), while a propulsive energy keeps the whole narrative going.
Strenuous efforts are made to humanise public prosecutor Giuliano Mignini (Francesco Acquaroli), who led the murder investigation as a man led astray by his passionate sense of duty and frustration over his experience of pursuing the infamous Monster of Florence serial killer. His subordinates are given shorter shrift, and remain ciphers who are portrayed as having taken against Knox on a whim then found more and more things to be disgusted by, such as her public displays of affection with her boyfriend and later co-accused Raffaele Sollecito, and the vibrator in her washbag.
Perhaps the most shocking part of the story is the fact that Knox’s ordeal continued even after the trial and conviction of Rudy Guede, the man whose fingerprints and DNA (unlike that of Knox, Lumumba and Sollecito) were all over the crime scene. Or perhaps the most shocking part is that his name hardly resonates in the public consciousness, while “Foxy Knoxy” still has such potency.
The Twisted Tale of Amanda Knox has its flaws. The mannered, Wes Anderson-lite openings to each episode sit uneasily with the harrowing hours to which they give way and the script – particularly in those openings – can be dreadful. “We were just getting to know our young selves in this charmed and ancient city,” says Knox in a voiceover early on. And later: “Does truth actually exist if no one believes it?” At one point, investigator Monica (Roberta Mattei) describes Knox providing “unsolicited information in crude American spasms”.
Fortunately, the main parts are held together by an unreservedly brilliant performance by Grace Van Patten as Knox, in English and Italian (halting at first, fluent by the end of Knox’s incarceration), the ebullient, naive, overconfident, shattered young woman caught in so many currents and cross-currents it seems a miracle that she ever made it back to shore.
