Summary
Grace Van Patten is superb in Episode 2 of The Twisted Tale of Amanda Knox, a deliberately disorienting and really quite brilliant hour of television.
One suspects that Episode 2 is the showpiece hour of The Twisted Tale of Amanda Knox. Grace Van Patten, operating in a wildly different mode than in Tell Me Lies, for which she’s best known, is utterly superb in it. It’s also most symbolic of what exactly it is about the Amanda Knox case that has captivated people for so many years. It perfectly exemplifies the ignorance of proper procedure, the implicit bias, and the terrifying determination of a police force determined to prove that a foreign citizen committed a crime she so clearly didn’t. And the psychological — not to mention physical — brutality of their approach is deeply felt in a showstopper sequence towards the end, leading to Amanda’s “confession”.
That confession is teased right at the beginning of “Ci vediamo più tardi”, which forgoes the premiere’s split-timeline approach for a more straightforward narrative structure. Initially, it returns to the scene of the crime from the point of view of Giuseppe, and we see the seeds of Amanda’s apparent guilt being planted. The cozy ways in which the cops all observe and gossip about her give the game away. Even in the complete absence of any evidence, she’s presumed to be guilty. This entire hour is about proving it.
On the subject of evidence, it’s scanty at best. A secondary crime scene in the apartment below Amanda and Meredith’s, where the pot-smoking, basketball-playing boys lived, becomes an important component in the police’s narrative. The show is clever that way. It repurposes what in any other true-crime story would be clues as mile markers on the road to Amanda’s inevitable conviction. The police aren’t building a case; they’re telling a story, and peppering it with details that they can use to entrap Amanda.
Missing keys, weed plants, a cat, errant turds, phones being conveniently turned off — it’s all fodder. Amanda lies about some of the details because she thinks she’s defending her pals, but the audience knows she’s tying the noose around her own neck. It’s an unusual approach for a show like this, but a mightily effective one all the same, because Amanda’s utter obliviousness — the scene of her teaching a good-looking Italian cop some yoga positions in the middle of the station is a prime example — is less of a charming trait and more an ominous guarantee that she’s f*cked.
And, blimey, she is f*cked. But she isn’t the only one. As soon as the police turned up a hair in Meredith’s room belonging to a Black man, and we met Amanda’s lovely boss, Patrick, who just so happens to be Black, I knew where things were heading. This forms an important part of the story, since Amanda’s “confession” implicated Patrick, who had done nothing whatsoever, in Meredith’s murder.
But let’s talk about that confession. It’s the standout sequence of The Twisted Tale of Amanda Knox Episode 2, and is superbly well orchestrated by director Michael Uppendahl. Initially, as before, Amanda is interviewed without an interpreter present. While it starts out as a one-on-one, several other officers get involved. In an extreme close-up of Van Patten supplemented with audio distortion and superimposed images, we see how the aggressive questioning starts to break her down. We see a cop strike her multiple times from behind. We see her worsening distress. And we understand quite suddenly how one might be compelled to confess to a crime they hadn’t committed, and to implicate someone else in that crime for good measure. Anything to make the torment stop.
It’s only when you stop to think for a moment that you realize how little evidence the police have. Their “smoking gun” is a text Amanda sent to Patrick saying, “See you later, have a good evening,” when he told her she didn’t need to work. To an English speaker, that’s clearly a casual goodbye. To the Italian police, it was evidence of a planned meet-up. The idea that Amanda and Rafaele switched their phones off so they could smoke pot and have sex unmolested — which, we see in flashbacks, is what they did — is somehow incomprehensible. The whole thing’s horrifying precisely because it’s absurd.
And as soon as the police get what they want, that’s it. Case closed. Amanda, Rafaele, and Patrick are all charged. Amanda’s original statement, despite her providing another contrary one almost immediately after, is taken as gospel. There’s no opportunity to walk anything back or clarify what she meant; no consideration for the language barrier or the extreme stress of the interrogation. She’s guilty.
While all this is going on, Edda is making her way to Italy to see Amanda. By the time she gets there, her daughter is all over the news, a murderer who confessed to her crime. Something tells me this won’t be much of a holiday.
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