In the Hulu limited series The Twisted Tale of Amanda Knox, Grace Van Patten’s version of the infamous American co-ed studying abroad in Italy repeatedly describes herself as “weird.” She imagines fliers animating themselves to life and beckoning her, she speaks to her stuffed animals, she lets whimsical visions shape her sense of reality like she’s Audrey Tautou in her favorite film, Amélie. All of these moments, the series suggests, are expressions of her naïveté, of how unprepared she was for the deluge of suspicion, smearing, and international infamy that would come her way once she was accused of killing her British roommate, Meredith Kercher. The Twisted Tale of Amanda Knox, which is executive-produced by Knox and features a finale co-written by her and showrunner K.J. Steinberg, is an attempt to redefine her as a girl rather than a temptress, an innocent rather than a murderer. It’s an understandable impulse, but it’s not enough to fuel eight episodes of a miniseries that’s told from a defensive crouch, and that feels contradictory as it chastises viewers for paying attention to Knox’s story back then and yet implores us to pay attention to it again now.
On November 2, 2007, Kercher’s body was found under a blanket in her locked bedroom. Almost immediately, the 20-year-old Knox and her Italian boyfriend, Raffaele Sollecito, were suspected of taking part in her murder in what prosecutors later described as a twisted sexual game gone wrong, despite the lack of DNA evidence linking them to the scene. Knox signed a confession claiming she, Sollecito, and her boss, Congolese bar owner Patrick Lumumba, committed the crime. She would later retract that confession, saying it was made under duress, but over the next eight years, Knox and Sollecito would be found guilty, and acquitted, twice. The trials became a massive international story, sparking news coverage around the world. Since then, there have been two major documentaries about the case, Knox has written two memoirs, and has gone on a variety of podcasts as well as hosted two of her own.
While this is the first time Knox has been directly involved with a narrative dramatization of this story, The Twisted Tale of Amanda Knox doesn’t add much to our understanding of her ordeal that hasn’t already been addressed in those other formats. Nor does the series raise questions Knox can’t answer or support any viewpoints that don’t align with hers. There are some solid performances in the ensemble cast, but the series’s guiding Knox-innocent viewpoint, combined with Knox’s direct involvement, makes the whole thing feel like its primary objective is buffing out any remaining dings and dents in her public image rather than providing a new angle on a story we’ve heard many, many times over.
Telling a true-crime story from the perspective of the accused to reveal how they might have been misunderstood is no longer a novel adaptation choice: Ryan Murphy’s American Crime Story and Monster anthology series do this; so too did Candy, Love and Death, and Inventing Anna. Culturally, we tend to become obsessed with female criminals, saddling them with heteronormative, conservative, misogynist baggage while also fetishizing their sexual preferences, their social behaviors, and their appearance. The Twisted Tale of Amanda Knox is right to kick back against all that stuff, to point out how salacious the media can be and to criticize our rigid expectations for how women behave on a public stage. (Monica Lewinsky, whose story received similar treatment in Impeachment: American Crime Story, is an executive producer here.) But that mission-oriented intent ends up working against a series that rarely distinguishes itself from the phenomena it’s pillorying.
During her trial, Knox was painted scarlet in a furor of sexism and nationalism, the victim of broad stereotypes against her country, her youth, and her gender. In fighting back against her accusers, The Twisted Tale of Amanda Knox does the exact same thing, relying on superficial characterizations to quantify her many enemies and acquaintances: Nefarious, oversexed, woman-hating Italians who insult and physically abuse Van Patten’s Amanda; grubby journalists who lambast her sexual history and joke about whether she got fat in prison; the lascivious and sinister convicted killer Rudy Guede, who when he first sees Amanda confidently asserts that he’s going to have sex with her because she’s American, so of course she’s easy; and, most disappointingly, the beautiful but silent Meredith, who is mostly rendered in the slow-motion, gauzily lit bliss typical of a true-crime victim. The Twisted Tale of Amanda Knox gives its titular woman a voice, but to do so, it renders Kercher voiceless. For all its criticisms about how Knox was scapegoated, the limited series slides too easily into its own set of stereotypes.
Like seemingly every other series these days, The Twisted Tale of Amanda Knox begins in one timeline and then jumps backward into another. In 2022, Amanda, her husband, Chris (Jared Canfield), their young daughter, and Amanda’s mother, Edda (Sharon Horgan), return to Italy for a secret meeting between Italian prosecutor Giuliano Mignini (Francesco Acquaroli) and Amanda, who wants to understand why he stuck to his ludicrous theories about her guilt even as none of the forensics indicated her presence at Kercher’s death. From there, the miniseries jumps around in time. As Amanda narrates from the present, providing commentary about how unprepared she was for the Italian police’s cruelty and why her decisions during the investigation and trial were misguided, the series also portrays things she couldn’t have contemporaneously seen or known about: An episode is told from Mignini’s perspective (and makes him seem like a God-obsessed lunatic), and another from that of Sollecito (Giuseppe De Domenico); Amanda’s father, Curt (John Hoogenakker), is shown bickering with Edda about how to deal with increasing media pressure; Guede’s burglary of a school establishes his villainy.
That sprawl is meant to provide a view of how the case transformed into something untenable, but the series quickly falls into a tiresome pattern of Amanda acting oddly and representing herself badly, lingering on her nonsensical behaviors before emphasizing that it was the system that was wrong, not her. The Italian police use her poor grasp of Italian and their own blindspots about American culture to bolster their bizarre theories. A montage of clips from the crime scene reminds us of the lack of evidence implicating her. Amanda cuddles and kisses her boyfriend at the police station in the initial hours after Kercher was found and wears a T-shirt with the graphic “All you need is love” to court — and deals with a warden who sneeringly asks whether she enjoys orgies, and a court audience who laugh derisively when, in her broken Italian, she tries to explain why she owns a vibrator.
This all looks hellish to have lived through, but the series doesn’t provide enough of Amanda’s interiority to really feel for her on a human level — especially as it shrinks away from grappling with the lesser-known parts of this story that could have given us a broader view of the case without falling into “the entire country of Italy is evil” flatness. Did Knox’s university or the American Embassy in Italy get involved? Did her family ever reach out to the American government for assistance? Did Knox’s and Kercher’s families ever meet? What happened, if anything, to the other cops, lawyers, judges, and jurors involved in the case; did they ever speak about their experiences or express any kind of regret? Instead, The Twisted Tale of Amanda Knox obsesses over certain wacky elements of this case, like Guede’s calling card of leaving feces at the scene of a crime and Kercher’s other roommates accusing Knox of also being messy with her No. 2s. The series undermines its own points about the dangers of miscommunication and jingoism by fixating on the same untoward details that tabloids were obsessing over years before.
“Does truth actually exist if no one believes it?” Amanda wonders, but the issue here is that this story’s truth is already well-established, in many other media that don’t ask for eight hours of your life. In rehashing that truth, The Twisted Tale of Amanda Knox zigzags less than it meanders, and whatever feints it makes toward a reflective gaze are too little, too late. Kudos to the show for providing such clear evidence that no, you should never, ever talk to the cops (as an ACAB text, it’s pretty unparalleled), for presenting Chris Cuomo as an opportunistic asshole who cons Amanda into a combative interview, and for sprinkling in moments of resentment toward Amanda from her family, who struggle with how the case took over their lives. Those moments of friction feel like what the dominant narrative of Knox’s innocence has been missing, and although Van Patten often feels a bit too blank in her performance, she’s genuinely moving in a sequence in which Amanda argues with her shocked family about wanting to go back to Italy. The series’s suggestion that Amanda has been misunderstood not only by the people prosecuting and persecuting her, but also by those who are supposed to love and support her, is a fascinating one. Whether Knox deserved or invited that treatment from her inner circle is an angle of self-analysis that’s more interesting than nearly anything else presented in The Twisted Tale of Amanda Knox, and the reluctance to engage with it is just one example among many of Knox’s involvement in the series holding it back.
