Summary
The Twisted Tale of Amanda Knox gets off to a dizzying start in Episode 1, building an effective feeling of confusion and bias that sets the stage for a famously knotty miscarriage of justice.
There’s a surprisingly light touch to the earliest portions of The Twisted Tale of Amanda Knox, Hulu’s adaptation of Knox’s 2013 memoir, Waiting to Be Heard. Produced by Knox herself alongside Monica Lewinsky, of all people, Episode 1 masquerades for a while — a taut 2022-set opening notwithstanding — as something resembling a fish-out-of-water comedy. It doesn’t maintain this vibe, but it’s an arrestingly curious one that makes the whiplash-sudden sting of the premiere’s back half all the more effective.
But make no mistake — this is Amanda Knox’s story. Her narration crops up often, and the earliest scenes depict her childhood of showboating eccentricity divided between two families on account of separated parents (her mother, Edda, played by Sharon Horgan, crops up semi-regularly in both the 2022 and 2007 timelines.) This isn’t the story of Meredith Kercher, the fellow exchange student Knox was very famously accused of killing in Perugia, Italy. We don’t see her in this premiere, at least not fully; she can be glimpsed in half-remembered, hazy flashbacks, but there’s no sense of who she was before she became a victim. That isn’t the point.
It becomes obvious quite quickly what the point is. Those early knockabout scenes of a young Amanda breezing her way through Italy, sharing an upstairs apartment with several other similarly-aged women and enjoying a whirlwind romance with her new boyfriend, an Italian named Raffaele Sollicito, quickly give way to dizzying horror. Meredith returns home after spending a night at Rafaele’s to discover a creepy turd in the toilet and blood on the floor. Next is evidence of a break-in. Then comes the arrival of two Postal Police officers, there on an unrelated matter, and then the Carabinieri, who break down Meredith’s locked bedroom door to find her corpse inside.
This all happens quickly. Nobody has any real idea what’s happening. The whole thing’s a mess of crisscrossing accusations, misunderstood questions, and conflicting motives. Phones ring. People shout. Eventually, the severity of the situation becomes clear, and Amanda’s obnoxious American attitude makes her an immediate suspect to the Italian police. This is the point. It’s obvious to the viewer, and quickly to Amanda, that she has been identified as the perpetrator without any evidence or motive suggesting she’s guilty. The police are immediately intent on pinning the murder on her, and are willing to contort a flimsy justice system to do so.
I’ll grant you that some of Amanda’s behaviour is a little weird. Her own narration identifies her as a deer in the headlights, and her constant canoodling with Rafaele is deeply weird in context. But nothing in her demeanour, clueless though she might be, suggests she has murdered anyone. There’s no “did she really do it?” ambiguity. We know that Amanda is being wrongly accused because all of the people accusing her are sneeringly proud of their immediate assumptions and biases.
Everything that follows in the back half of The Twisted Tale of Amanda Knox Episode 1 is designed to reiterate the idea she was perceived to be guilty the second she first entered the police station. She’s interviewed at length, initially without a translator despite her extremely limited grasp of Italian, and even when a translator is provided, the questions are leading and abrupt. When the other students are allowed to leave, Amanda is instructed to return the next day, bright and early. Edda wants Amanda to return home, but she refuses under the misapprehension that she’s an important witness who is integral to the case. The idea that she’s being fitted up for the crime never occurs to her.
On two occasions after the cold open, “Amanda” returns to the 2022 timeline, with Amanda returning to Italy with Edda and her husband, Chris, despite a wild media frenzy. During the second of these, she meets with Giuliano Mignini, the lead investigator and prosecutor on Meredith’s case. This secondary storyline, presumably about Amanda’s efforts to find closure and understanding many years after Mignini had secured her conviction for a crime she didn’t commit, will likely be developed in the margins of each episode. But it’s the 2007-set scenes that really resonate — and undeniably frustrate — here in the opener.
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