The truth is, truth outs. That’s why Hollywood has to be careful when it rips stories from the headlines: unsolved mysteries are liable to solve themselves in due course.
In telling the story of Meredith Kercher, the British student murdered in Italy in 2007, the Lifetime network waited cautiously until after the conviction of Kercher’s American roommate Amanda Knox to begin chronicling the affair. Little did they know that their glossy, Hayden Panettiere-starring dramatisation Amanda Knox: Murder On Trial In Italy would be nullified six months after its release by Knox’s surprise exoneration on appeal.
With the benefit of a decade of hindsight, Netflix’s more polished overview Amanda Knox approaches the story with a clear head, a clear conscience and — like 90 per cent of contemporary documentaries — an abundance of crystal-clear drone camerawork.
Interviewing most of the key players at length, the film lays the blame for Knox’s false conviction at the twin doors of media hype and moral self-righteousness. Knox, it seems, spent four years in prison largely for a failure to grieve in quite the way that various middle-aged men would have liked.
Chief prosecutor Giuliano Mignini still insists he had it right all along, citing as evidence of Knox’s guilt the fact that Kercher’s killer covered her body with a sheet, something Mignini maintains “a man would never think to do”. Like a pound-shop Poirot, he bloviates on his supposed powers of intuition, despite the fact that he was disciplined last year by Italy’s council of magistrates for botching the case.
Former Daily Mail journalist Nick Pisa seems similarly keen to indict himself, eagerly re-enacting for the camera his frenzied attempts to label “Foxy Knoxy” a psychopathic killer with a penchant for satanic sex games. Recalling the leaking of Knox’s prison diary, which conveyed her anguish at being given a falsified HIV diagnosis by Italian authorities, Pisa condemns the leak, then adds boastfully: “I was probably one of the first people who managed to get hold of it.”
Those who continue to assert Knox’s guilt will no doubt scoff as she tells her well-honed version of events, seeming less like a woman once convicted of murder and more like a sardonic podcast host. But ultimately, the film warns against this pop-psychological approach to criminal investigation, demonstrating that a rush to emotive judgement — much like the rush to convert headlines into gaudy TV thrillers — makes fools of us all.
