The Twisted Tale of Amanda Knox

(Hulu, TV mini-series, 8 episodes, USA, 2025)

In the publicity for this series, creator K.J. Steinberg reveals something very illuminating about the way TV series are conceptualised in the 2020s. What’s the hook to the real-life story of Amanda Knox, how to give it a satisfying dramatic arc? Hold on: as if the basic template of a young woman wrongly accused of complicity in the gruesome 2007 sex-murder of Meredith Kercher, held for years in an Italian jail, and fighting for eventual freedom and the ‘clearing of her name’ isn’t already drama enough?

Oh, no: a hook is required! And, according to Steinberg, it came from two sources: one is the fact that, on her last carefree night before the police investigation began, Amanda (played with enormous vibrancy by Grace Van Patten) watched, alongside her new boyfriend, Raffaele Sollecito (Giuseppe De Domenico), her all-time fave movie Amélie (2001) on a laptop. This is a fun-fact mentioned over and over, so that we don’t miss its significance for the overall aesthetic of the series in its nuttier moments: to Amanda, in her happy or brave-facing phases (such as staring out the narrow window of her jail cell), life is a subjectively-projected, digitally-enhanced ball of wonders and marvels! (Aside: According to John Follain’s comprehensive account Death in Perugia, a film that had stoked Amanda’s romantic expectations of Italy was Bertolucci’s Stealing Beauty!)

But the Amélian gloss has another purpose, as well: to explain or justify the behaviour from Knox that, in the immediate aftermath of Kercher’s murder, seemed to key eyewitnesses to be weirdly dissociative (cartwheels at the police station, giggling with Raffaele, etc.), and hence highly suspicious. Then again, wasn’t that exactly Meursault’s problem in Camus’ L’Étranger – convicted for not responding ‘appropriately’, in society’s eyes, to a death?

And the other hook? That’s not Raffaele or the real killer, Rudy Guede – who, ultimately, doesn’t figure much in proceedings here (the actor Malich Cissé is listed way, way down the cast list) – either of whom might have been a logical choice for some showrunners. In fact, it’s public prosecutor Giuliano Mignini (Francesco Acquaroli, who gives a fine performance) – already notorious at the time of the Knox case for his (failed) obsession with cracking the Monster of Florence mystery earlier in the 2000s (he is, by the way, not a character in Stefano Sollima’s 1980s-framed 2025 series on Il Mostro).

These parti pris choices have important consequences for the episodic structuring of Twisted Tale. The overall framing device occurs years after the initial incident, when Amanda, now with husband and small child as well as her ever-worried mother, Edda (Sharon Horgan), ‘sneaks back’ into Italy for a meeting with … Mignini himself (a rendezvous overseen by a sympathetic Catholic priest from Amanda’s prison years!). Will the vicious paparazzi pick up the scent and pounce once more? Will Amanda somehow end up back in the Italian slammer? More importantly, will Mignini admit to his oversight, his wrong judgement, his bias in the case? After all, he and Amanda have lately been sharing a warm correspondence, and he has shown apparent sympathy toward her cause …

As in the series (episode 8, to be exact): back to that later. What goes on between the pillars of the basic narrative frame? It is the familiar (maybe too familiar) contemporary televisual form of the mosaic, shifting its central focus from episode to episode. So there’s a Raffaele episode (drawing upon his own memoir) – this rather passive chap (at least as he is depicted here) even gets his prime moment of pathos, when his eternal declaration of love for Amanda, post-trial, merely elicits a flatly conclusive kiss-off ciao from her! (They do meet up again later in the framing story, and it’s a well-written scene.) There’s a Mignini episode, delving into his formative past (Amélie for Amanda, Monster of Florence for him: some parity!). There’s also a back-in-the-USA episode, showing fraying relations between the various parts of the extended Knox family. (This section works in a powerful real-life detail: on her return home, Amanda had to be reminded to consciously stop speaking in the Italian she had fully mastered while in the pen.)

For most of the rest of the running time, we are aligned (as the narratologists say) with Amanda. Inevitably and understandably so: the production team is a powerhouse engine of female empowerment, from Steinberg and Knox herself (who co-wrote the final episode, and underpins the entire series with her two books of memoir) to … Monica Lewinsky! Perhaps also inevitably, but less forgivably, there are only token glimpses into the life and personality of Kercher the victim, and the ordeal of her family members during the trial. (Her father John wrote a moving book, Meredith [2012], in her memory.) Diya (Patrick) Lumumba (Souleymane Seye Ndiaye) is featured more prominently, because the circumstances of Knox’s false citing of his presence on the night of the murder are so crucial to her version of what really happened at the police station: these are the series’ best and most powerful scenes, where she is brutalised during the endless interrogation (to the point of hallucinating Lumumba’s involvement), and much rests on the cultural-linguistic crossed wires attached to her texted phrase “see you later” (watch what you casually write on your mobile during holidays abroad!).

So, the all-American emphasis here is on ‘telling one’s truth’ and broadcasting it to the wide world. With a small, ‘continental’ complication of ethics awaiting us at the end … Meanwhile, the episodes go easy on the detailing of Amanda’s sex life while in Italy (which the mass-media went mass-crazy over): here, she’s just a youthful, high-spirited, Amélie-souled kid rather than the depraved Foxy Konxy of rumour-mill, social-media legend. (The series gives us only – perhaps mercifully – sidelong, split-second, sometimes cryptic indices of this global, wall-to-wall media coverage of the time.) Conversely, the investigators from the Italian law system are frequently given an owlish, puritanical, even sinister edge – the casting on this side of the ledger has a touch of Dario Argento!

The allocation of directors – they were given, one presumes from the extensive location work in Perugia, a handsome budget and room to move, style-wise – follows the typecasting logic that is becoming more and more evident in current TV series. One solidly professional guy (Michael Uppendahl of Mad Men fame) for the first two episodes, then all women: Cate Shortland from Australia, Natalia Leite from Brazil, and Vietnamese-American Quyen Tran. That’s an intriguing list, drawing upon directors who have dealt with youth themes as well as ‘cultural displacement’ scenarios (in Shortland’s case, Somersault [2004] for the former, Berlin Syndrome [2017] for the latter). What has to be said for The Twisted Tale of Amanda Knox is that, at the very least, it zips along, and has a lot of energy and colourful detail. And it’s a heck of a lot better than Michael Winterbottom’s horrendous fantasia on the case, The Face of an Angel (2014), which is his absolute worst film.

I mentioned a complication at the very end, and it’s the most intriguing bit of content-inclusion in the series. Mignini – notwithstanding a slightly silly hint in the very final shot – does not concede to Amanda, in their crowning face-to-face meeting, that he was wrong. In fact, he spins a fascinating theory of two regimes of truth: the personal (what he may have personally come to believe or accept) and the juridical: what the court decided, in the course of its due processes. And it’s the juridical truth to which he remains bound and foresworn. This is a note that puts a dampener on the ‘I will be vindicated in the eyes of the world’ drive of the project.

Sure, Knox gets, through this TV show and her other efforts, ‘a voice’, the public platform she was, for so long, denied; but what does such triumphant self-affirmation mean in the face of institutions and laws, and their sedimented histories of duly ‘subjected’ players? One needs to turn to other TV series past and present – Ken Loach’s Days of Hope (1975) or Marco Bellocchio’s Exterior Night (2022) – for a different kind of mosaic-drama built upon less individualistic – and less American –premises.

© Adrian Martin 29 October 2025