In a notorious video that circulated around the globe, 20-year-old exchange student Amanda Knox is kissing her boyfriend, Raffaele Sollecito. Out of context, it looks like banal, sun-dappled vacation footage—American girl goes to picturesque Perugia, falls for scarf-wearing Italian boy. In fact, the couple had just learned, after an eerie morning at the apartment Knox shared with three other young women, that police had found her roommate Meredith Kercher brutally murdered in Kercher’s bedroom. The kiss became a key piece of a prosecutorial propaganda campaign, giddily inflamed by the tabloid media, that framed Knox as a perverse, cold-blooded killer. You only have to keep watching for a few more seconds, as the lovers turn away from one another, to catch the look of pain and confusion on her face and realize she’s not celebrating.
The moment is recreated in The Twisted Tale of Amanda Knox, a true crime drama that traces the since-exonerated Knox’s Kafkaesque ordeal in an Italian justice system that tarred her as a psycho sex fiend who masterminded Kercher’s rape and murder. What’s strange, considering that Knox, her husband Chris Robinson, and public-shaming expert Monica Lewinsky are among the series’ executive producers, is how much more ambiguous the kiss looks in this telling. When Grace Van Patten, who plays Knox, turns to face the camera, her expression is wide-eyed and inscrutable. Twisted is otherwise overwhelmingly sympathetic to its protagonist, and Van Patten (Nine Perfect Strangers, Tell Me Lies) does an admirable job with limited material. Yet the fumbling of this scene captures what is so frustrating about the show. For all its fidelity to the complicated facts of one of this century’s most infamous murder cases, Twisted fails to deliver the one element of Knox’s story that might be best expressed through scripted drama: insight into who its viciously caricatured, widely misunderstood subject really is.
The eight-part series, helmed by showrunner K.J. Steinberg (This Is Us), often plays like an extended version of the broad reenactments you see in crime docs. In a way, this makes sense. There is much to reenact, to explain and unravel and contextualize, in a legal saga that began on Nov. 2, 2007, the morning Kercher’s body was discovered, and had yet to be fully resolved as late as this year. Italy’s justice system differs greatly from its American counterpart; prosecutors lead police investigations, criminal and civil trials can be consolidated into the same proceedings, juries in even the highest-profile cases are unsequestered. From paparazzi photos to footage recorded at the scene by the forensics team to TV news reports to interviews with Knox, plenty of imagery exists from throughout this story—much of which already appeared in the 2016 Netflix documentary Amanda Knox before being restaged, shot-for-shot, in Twisted.
Following a flash-forward to Amanda’s return to Italy in 2022, during which she spends a tense car ride hiding under a blanket from local media ravenous for a glimpse of its favorite villain, the tale unfolds in mostly chronological order. We watch an ingenuous Amanda skip around Perugia, in the fall of 2007, living out a study-abroad fairytale with her new boyfriend, Raffaele (Giuseppe De Domenico, heartbreaking), and three female roommates, including Meredith (Rhianne Barreto), a British student. About 10 minutes into the premiere, the dream sours. Amanda returns to her adorable apartment to shower after a night at Raffa’s but slowly realizes something isn’t right. There are blood stains in the bathroom, a revolting mess in the toilet. Meredith’s door is locked, and no one answers when Amanda calls out to her.
Soon after the body is found, the young couple become crucial witnesses in the police investigation, detained at the station for days’ worth of questioning. Bilingual scripts effectively demonstrate how the language barrier exacerbated Knox’s predicament, as she was far from fluent in Italian at the time and often lacked an adequate translator. It is (almost cartoonishly) clear from the outset that Amanda has rubbed the investigators the wrong way. They don’t like the kiss, or her sexual candor, or the vibrator that was found among her toiletries; their prejudices are reinforced when Meredith’s British friends express their own dislike for Amanda. A pair of nightmarish, physically and psychologically violent marathon interrogations ends with Raffaele manipulated into destroying her alibi and a disoriented Amanda implicating Patrick Lumumba (Souleymane Seye Ndiaye), the proprietor of the bar where she worked, in the murder. (Though she almost immediately recanted this accusation, Lumumba was arrested, then quickly cleared, and a slander charge was added to list of crimes for which she’d face trial.)
The middle half of the series wades, somewhat laboriously, through years of legal wrangling and incarceration, as Amanda and Raffaele are found guilty and serve four years of their sentences before seeing their convictions overturned due to an astonishing absence of reliable physical evidence. The arrival in Italy of Amanda’s fiercely loyal mother, Edda Mellas (the usually great Sharon Horgan, struggling with an American accent), should raise the emotional stakes, but, as is the case with so much of the show’s dialogue, the women mostly speak in gloomy exposition. Richer and more thoughtfully depicted is the relationship that Amanda, an avowed atheist, develops with Don Saulo Scarabattoli (Alfredo Pea), the prison’s open-minded, in-house priest. The advice he gives her when she’s on the verge of yielding to despair over what could become a life sentence—”You can serve humanity even if it doesn’t serve you”—will shape her future.
Knox and Lewinsky have talked about how they insisted on ending Twisted not with Amanda and Raffaele’s first acquittal, on appeal in 2011, but with a pair of episodes that trace the case’s aftermath: the bumpy reacclimation to freedom, the permanent reputational damage, the search for purpose in a life derailed, the ongoing legal woes and media circus. The instinct to move beyond the true crime template, avoiding a false happily-ever-after ending, is a good one. But as executed, the penultimate episode just feels like more trudging from point to point on a timeline of well-documented events. Amanda endures an aggressive interview with Chris Cuomo (Josh Burdett): Check. Amanda finds community with other exonerees: Check.
The finale—which is, unfortunately, the only episode co-written by Knox—goes deeper. We see Amanda, now an author, wife, and mother, compare battle scars with Raffaele and confront the prosecutor, Giuliano Mignini (Francesco Acquaroli), who, despite the early emergence of airtight forensic evidence implicating the third person convicted of Kercher’s murder, perpetrated the character assassination that led to her imprisonment. It’s in this coda that the series finally feels like it’s about something other than the obvious fact that Knox suffered a grave injustice. We discover that, just as Amanda is not the sex-crazed monster Mignini created, Mignini is not the bloodthirsty misogynist her allies imagined; he’s a man tortured by personal demons. Everyone is more complicated than tabloid headlines make them out to be. (Knox took this argument to an extreme in a recent Atlantic essay that called the common description of University of Idaho killer Bryan Kohberger as, simply, evil “an excuse to stop thinking, to ignore the evidence, to hate and punish someone law enforcement didn’t, or wouldn’t, understand.”)
This perspective tempers the hysteria of an earlier episode, which opens with a mini-biography narrated by Mignini that races from a childhood steeped in the Madonna-whore complex to his father’s untimely death (“You’re the man of the house now,” the boy is told, graveside, in an egregiously canned bit of dialogue) to the debacle that was his involvement in the Monster of Florence serial killer case. The Italian-stereotype quotient is high in this rendering, as it also is in another episode’s more empathetic portrait of Raffaele. Perhaps out of respect for the privacy of the real people or their families, we barely spend any time with Meredith or Patrick—another innocent victim, whose experience as a Black, Congolese immigrant feels under-acknowledged in a story so concerned with Amanda’s gendered shaming. But Raffa, a sweet, inexperienced romantic hoping for another shot at love with a woman he adores, comes through clearly.
I left the series feeling as if I knew him much better than I knew Amanda, even though she gets far more screen time than any other character and Van Patten narrates most of the episodes. (These voiceovers can get pretty purple: “Telling my tale is a sticky, tricky thing—especially when I was a stranger to my story’s true beginning.”) This is not for lack of discussion about her personality. She is described, variously, as quirky, impassive, naive, vulgar, blithely optimistic. “Everyone says I’m like Amélie”—the eponymous gamine from the movie she and Raffaele watched the night of Meredith’s murder—“because I’m a weirdo,” Amanda says at one point. Edda calls her “sunny despite everything.” One of Meredith’s friends testifies that the defendant struck her as “cold,” “unfeeling,” and “quite open about her sex life.” It’s fine that none of these contradictory characterizations bear much resemblance to the Amanda we observe. This is, after all, the story of a woman who was misread by a significant chunk of Earth’s population.
But The Twisted Tale of Amanda Knox should have a compelling counternarrative to offer about Amanda Knox. To the extent that she’s defined, it’s in terms of what she self-evidently is not—not a killer, not a sex freak, not a callous American femme fatale. With ample evidence of Knox’s innocence available for over a decade, Steinberg and her writers had the chance to do something more than mount yet another defense. They could’ve made us understand Amanda’s thinking in the most awkward and insensitive-seeming moments of her trial by media. Instead, the show tends to replay these gaffes without adding much new perspective. Amanda’s alleged weirdness is mentioned more than it’s explored; how much could we have learned about her if Steinberg hadn’t rushed through a scene set at her time-traveler-themed wedding? A flashback episode that gave us more time with Amanda before Meredith’s death might also have helped.
Some of the best crime docudramas, like Hulu’s own The Dropout and The Girl From Plainville, thrive on nuanced portraiture of real women whose mass-media villain edits contain far more truth than “Foxy Knoxy.” Without powerful insight into a person who is also Twisted’s executive producer—and who has drawn more perceptive conclusions from her ordeal in two memoirs, multiple podcasts, and the Netflix doc—it’s hard to justify the reopening of 18-year-old wounds.
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