Late into “The Twisted Tale of Amanda Knox,” the eight-part Hulu limited series recounting the aftermath of the 2007 murder of British study-abroad student Meredith Kercher in Italy, a supporting character makes a valid point.
Speaking many years after the murder, he notes that the case is still identified primarily as the “Amanda Knox” case, even though Knox, Kercher’s American roommate in Perugia, Italy, was acquitted of killing Kercher in 2015 after a yearslong odyssey that included four years in custody.
His observation makes a viewer presume the show will finally get to the part where it tells us more about Kercher, whose brief life story, as Knox herself has said in real life, was obscured by the sensational, yearslong legal battles of Knox and Raffaele Sollecito, the Italian boyfriend arrested alongside Knox.
But that part never comes, and its absence mars this mostly engaging and well-acted limited series anchored by Grace Van Patten’s (Hulu’s “Tell Me Lies”) compelling immediacy in the title role. Along with telling Knox’s story in detail, the show devotes significant screen time to the backstory of one-time beau Sollecito (played with great sensitivity by Giuseppe De Domenico). Yet Kercher remains a cipher, shown mostly in flashes.
Knox served as an executive producer on this series, created by K.J. Steinberg (“This is Us”) based on Knox’s 2013 memoir (another dropped this year). But to ascribe any or all storytelling choices to Knox would just follow old patterns. As “The Twisted Tale of Amanda Knox” makes clear, the instinct of Italian police to impose traits and behaviors on Knox that did not exist is what started her harrowing journey through Italy’s criminal justice system.
Van Patten does not resemble Knox, nor does she mimic her. But she captures that slightly off-kilter intensity that has always made Knox a figure of fascination — and is acknowledged by Knox and other characters in the series. Knox’s on-screen quirks include a make-out session with Sollecito shortly after Kercher’s body was discovered, in full view of police.
Van Patten’s Knox is also overly demonstrative, prostrating herself to thank a housemate for making dinner and hanging on friends. You can see how what might come off as playful and puppyish to some observers would give others the ick.
Her unconventional behavior — especially just after the murder — unfairly makes Knox the subject of suspicion in “Twisted Tale of Amanda Knox.” She also raises eyebrows for having decided, the morning after the crime occurred, to take a shower and get ready in the villa she shared with Meredith and two Italian women despite noticing the door being left open and blood spots in the bathroom.
Knox is also sexually active and keeps a vibrator in a clear makeup case visible under the sink — behavior that puts her on the wrong side of the Madonna-whore line in heavily Catholic Italy. She also (sit down for this) smokes marijuana.
Subject to intense police questioning, Knox confesses to being home the night of the murder and implicates her boss, Congolese bar owner Patrick Lumumba, in the attack. Her naming of Lumumba, who in real life is the subject of a successful slander prosecution against Knox, is presented as having occurred under obvious duress and as the result of heavy suggestion by police. Yet there is no denying the visceral impact of seeing a young, white woman implicate a Black man: It looks and feels like scapegoating.
Knox walked back her statement almost immediately, according to the series, and DNA shows Rudy Guede, an acquaintance of Knox’s downstairs neighbors, to be the killer. But the Italian prosecutor (Francesco Acquaroli) continues to pursue Knox and Sollecito based on an elaborate scenario of sexual deviancy and revenge — plus dubious physical evidence. Acquaroli is powerful yet enigmatic as a man whose conscience always seems at war with his need to be right.
Steinberg’s heightened, almost operatic storytelling approach of unusual camera angles, dramatic music, and lawyers assassinating the characters of innocent young defendants in passionate Italian, suits the proceedings’ weird mix of absurdity and frightening stakes.
Within this theatrical atmosphere, a quiet moment where Knox stands to dispute testimony by her Italian housemate — whom Knox is shocked to see testifying for the prosecution — turns even more heartbreaking. Van Patten shows the intense betrayal of a young person just discovering that people can be nice to your face yet talk behind your back.
The misogyny on display is so over the top it seems out of a different century. But Knox’s time as one of the world’s most famous defendants occurred during a particularly nasty flashpoint for tabloid treatment of young women including Knox, Lindsay Lohan, Paris Hilton and Amy Winehouse. Although coverage of Knox in the U.S. leaned more toward bring-our-girl-home, People-magazine protective, the European press practically burned her in effigy. Paparazzi swarmed her court appearances.
Still, a supposedly fraught sequence in which a vehicle carrying Knox seemingly must evade photographers or other haters comes off as anticlimactic. Another sequence set years later involves a dangerous road trip in Italy with family members including Knox’s loyal mom (a solid Sharon Horgan). The mother later yells at Knox that the trip, despite all the worry and stress it caused, was for nothing.
One could take a cynical view and suggest that it was not for nothing, since it provided content for a limited series. Knox puts out a lot of content, as an author, podcast host and advocate for the wrongfully convicted. She offers her services as a speaker for hire.
It is clear Knox’s heart is in the right place and somewhat heartening to see her more at ease in the spotlight. But “The Twisted Tale of Amanda Knox” suggests, in moments where Knox is back home in Seattle after prison, that she might not have had full autonomy in picking her career path.
When she goes to a Halloween party, young people she’s known her whole life treat her differently and cannot help but stare. She also learns that family members mortgaged their houses to pay for her lawyers and starts writing her first memoir so she can sell it and pay them back.
Apart from changing her name and going off the grid, the real-life Knox seems to have had few viable options but to continue in public life. Out of many things that befall her in “The Twisted Tale of Amanda Knox,” this is one of the saddest.
“The Twisted Tale of Amanda Knox” premieres Wednesday, Aug. 20, on Hulu.