The Twisted Tale of Amanda Knox evaluate – shockingly tense TV from Knox and Monica Lewinsky | Tv & radio

Two issues have to be borne in thoughts about The Twisted Tale of Amanda Knox, a brand new true crime drama. The first is that Knox and Monica Lewinsky – each members of “The Sisterhood of Ill Repute”, as Knox has described them prior to now – are govt producers of the present. The second is that the household of Meredith Kercher, the 21-year-old British alternate scholar with whose homicide Knox and others had been charged in 2007, weren’t concerned within the sequence. Her sister Stephanie stated final yr to the Guardian: “Our family has been through so much and it is difficult to understand how this serves any purpose.”

To the primary level: it’s undoubtedly true that the topic of The Twisted Tale is Knox and her survival of a rare and terribly terrible expertise, and whereas not hagiographic, it’s not a warts-and-all profile both. Then once more, how a lot warts-and-all can there be for an strange 20-year-old excited to be finding out overseas – in Perugia, Italy – for the primary time? If you put aside the salacious narrative constructed up round her by a rabid press and fuelled by the preconceived prosecutorial notions across the crime, that’s what she was.

To the second: the grief of the Kercher household, and their enduring loss, is a horrible factor. But the aim of the sequence is evident – to indicate how this specific miscarriage of justice occurred and, by implication, how totally different forces, prejudices and appetites can mix to deliver them about generally. It is designed to provide the mislead the interesting notion that justice is all the time blind and its directors are all the time beacons of rectitude, shining mild into the darkness of wicked folks’s souls.

Over the course of eight dense and sometimes extraordinarily tense episodes, author KJ Steinberg (greatest identified for This Is Us) maps out Knox’s lengthy journey from first arrest for her flatmate’s homicide to eventual exoneration, through wrongful conviction, 4 years in jail and a number of trials. The outlines of the case are in all probability remembered by many people of an age to have adopted the headlines and articles that proliferated on the time, and the sequence does a very good job of illustrating every pivotal level because it arises (the preliminary misstep in establishing the time of loss of life, for instance. Similarly, the misinterpretation of the English phrase “See you later” as that means particular plans to satisfy had been established between Knox and her initially co-accused, Patrick Lumumba, paying homage to the very British “I popped him on the bed” expression misconstrued by a US viewers within the Louise Woodward trial), whereas a propulsive power retains the entire narrative going.

Strenuous efforts are made to humanise public prosecutor Giuliano Mignini (Francesco Acquaroli), who led the homicide investigation as a person led astray by his passionate sense of responsibility and frustration over his expertise of pursuing the notorious Monster of Florence serial killer. His subordinates are given shorter shrift, and stay ciphers who’re portrayed as having taken towards Knox on a whim then discovered increasingly issues to be disgusted by, akin to her public shows of affection together with her boyfriend and later co-accused Raffaele Sollecito, and the vibrator in her washbag.

Perhaps probably the most stunning a part of the story is the truth that Knox’s ordeal continued even after the trial and conviction of Rudy Guede, the person whose fingerprints and DNA (not like that of Knox, Lumumba and Sollecito) had been everywhere in the crime scene. Or maybe probably the most stunning half is that his identify hardly resonates within the public consciousness, whereas “Foxy Knoxy” nonetheless has such efficiency.

The Twisted Tale of Amanda Knox has its flaws. The mannered, Wes Anderson-lite openings to every episode sit uneasily with the harrowing hours to which they offer approach and the script – notably in these openings – might be dreadful. “We were just getting to know our young selves in this charmed and ancient city,” says Knox in a voiceover early on. And later: “Does truth actually exist if no one believes it?” At one level, investigator Monica (Roberta Mattei) describes Knox offering “unsolicited information in crude American spasms”.

Fortunately, the primary components are held collectively by an unreservedly sensible efficiency by Grace Van Patten as Knox, in English and Italian (halting at first, fluent by the top of Knox’s incarceration), the ebullient, naive, overconfident, shattered younger girl caught in so many currents and cross-currents it appears a miracle that she ever made it again to shore.