‘The Twisted Tale of Amanda Knox’ Review: Hulu Miniseries Is a Savvy, Compelling Take on True Crime

‘The Twisted Tale of Amanda Knox’ Review: Hulu Miniseries Is a Savvy, Compelling Take on True Crime

By now, we’re all familiar with the basic tropes of a true-crime miniseries.

First there’s the salacious title, promising lurid reveals from the landing page of your favorite streaming app. The crime, so singularly heinous it makes even a veteran cop recoil. The determined detective, who’ll stop at nothing in the pursuit of justice. The sensationalized trial, every detail passed from rapacious reporters to a bloodthirsty public. And at the heart of it all, the comely young woman whose life is ripped from her too soon.

The Twisted Tale of Amanda Knox, Hulu’s very good new entry in the genre, checks every box. But the story it tells isn’t quite the one we’ve grown accustomed to. Instead, by centering not the murder victim but the woman infamously and falsely convicted of the crime, it calls into question our appetite for these stories in the first place — pointedly redirecting our horror from the monsters supposedly among us to the murkier forces that create them, out of thin air if need be.

Just as we’re familiar with the true-crime format, we are, of course, well-versed in the Amanda Knox saga already: It’s been flooding the popular culture on and off since November 2007, when 21-year-old Meredith Kercher (Rhianne Barreto) was found dead in her apartment in Italy — and her American roommate, Amanda (Grace Van Patten), was arrested for the crime soon after, cast by the prosecution and then the media as a “Luciferina” spurred by sexual depravity and sheer cruelty.

Those who know that much probably also know that Amanda was eventually found guilty and locked up in an Italian prison. They might also recall that she was acquitted a few years later on appeal, and freed to return to her family in Seattle.

Yet despite that ruling, despite her continued insistence on her own innocence, despite the book she published detailing her experience, she’s been unable to completely separate herself from the crime she was never actually involved in.

The Twisted Tale of Amanda Knox represents Knox’s latest attempt to regain control of her narrative. The series, created by K.J. Steinberg (This Is Us), is executive produced by Knox and Monica Lewinsky and based on Knox’s 2013 memoir, Waiting to Be Heard. It aligns with other recent efforts to cast a more sympathetic light on maligned women of the not-too-distant past, from Hulu’s Pam & Tommy to the platform’s Natalia Grace drama Good American Family to FX’s Impeachment: American Crime Story. (Lewinsky is a subject of the latter.) The show lands on the more successful end of the spectrum in part by leveraging the same true-crime framing that damned her.

On this show, the sense of dread (aided by Jeff Russo’s ominous score) builds not to Meredith’s death but to Amanda’s arrest, as the 20-year-old — clueless and occasionally obnoxious but clearly not malicious — stumbles through imperfect Italian in police interviews or waves off her mother’s advice to find a lawyer. Its hottest fury is reserved not for the killer — as in real-life coverage of the case, he comes and goes so quickly he amounts to a footnote — but for a criminal justice system so intent on pinning Amanda that they ignore proper procedure, hard evidence and common sense.

The question it’s trying to answer is not why Meredith was killed, but why and how Amanda and her boyfriend, Raffaele Sollicito (an achingly sympathetic Giuseppe De Domenico), were blamed for it. We see how biases and resentments take root, how an exciting theory can overshadow reason, how the leering media attention feeds into the contentious court case and vice versa.

And we bear witness to the brutal psychological tactics levied against the defendants, with a particularly harrowing example arriving in the second episode. Van Patten’s heartbreaking performance and director Michael Uppendahl’s stylistic flourishes — including suffocating close-ups, audial distortion and superimposed images — pull us into Amanda’s intensifying distress as she’s questioned aggressively for hours in a language she barely comprehends. By the time she confesses to a crime she didn’t commit, we understand exactly how she got to a point where she saw no other choice.

But though Twisted Tale is Amanda’s story first and foremost, its sense of empathy casts a wider net. The series takes the time to dwell on the extreme emotional and financial stress placed on Amanda’s family (Sharon Horgan is especially moving as Amanda’s distraught mother) and, to a lesser extent, the disastrous personal and professional consequences for an innocent bar owner (Souleymane Seye Ndiaye) fingered in Amanda’s false confession.

It makes the explicit point that Amanda’s ordeal, while singular in its infamy, is not unique. A late installment sends Amanda to a conference for exonerees, where a mostly non-white crowd communes in front of slides printed with facts like “Nearly 1 in 5 death row exonerations involved prosecutorial misconduct.”

While Amanda narrates most of the eight-hour season, one chapter hands the reins over to Raffaele, shading in the white-knight complex left by a difficult childhood. Another gives the voiceover to Giuliano Mignini (an excellent Francesco Acquaroli), the domineering lead investigator and prosecutor. If the choice seems surprising at first, it’s part and parcel of Twisted Tale’s approach. He might be a bully, a cynic and possibly a bit of a pervert (he does seem awfully fixated on the notion that Amanda must have been involved in a deadly sex game), but he is no unknowable monster. He is, tragically and recognizably, all too human in his shortcomings.

There are limitations to Twisted Tale’s framing. For one, the focus on the personal experiences of people involved in the case leaves little room for it to grapple with the larger context of why we as a society were, and remain, so obsessed with this case — why it took off in a way few others have, of what it tells us about us that it did.

But its most obvious shortcoming is the way it sidelines the biggest victim in this whole scenario. “Meredith’s murder is always discussed in the context of Amanda. People are fixated on her and they’ve completely forgotten everybody else,” a character rightly points out. Yet Twisted Tale can’t help falling into the same trap. It’s scrupulously respectful in its portrayal of Kercher, never showing her body or the worst of the crime scene. But the flashbacks of her are too brief to offer any sense of who she was in life, beyond a carefree college kid like any other. While there’s something to be said for a series understanding the limits of its scope, the choice leaves it feeling a bit incomplete.

Then again, if anyone might understand the danger of imposing an unwanted perspective on a person unequipped to speak for herself, it’s Amanda Knox. “Story is a powerful thing,” she reflects in that narration. “The problem is that reality, as small, predictable and painful as it can be, often doesn’t hold the same allure.” In terms of prurient thrills, nothing in The Twisted Tale of Amanda Knox can compete with those early portrayals of her as a sex-crazed sadist. But in its heartbreaking, infuriating, unsparing account of the truth, it has a hold all its own.