WRONGFUL CONVICTION EXPLAINED

PERCEPTIONS CONTROL THE CRIME NARRATIVE

by PETER THOMAS BUSCH

Everything becomes a dream from the whimsy of childhood to the nightmare of a young adult.

Director Natalia Leite, et al, introduces Amanda Knox as a naïve reckless youth whose carefree acts get her in trouble in The Twister Tale of Amanda Knox (Series 2025).

Grace Van Patten plays Amanda Knox as having innate character flaws that cause her to be targeted by Italian prosecutors, even though the murderer has confessed, after Amanda finds her roommate murdered.

Giuseppe De Domenico plays Raffaele Sollecito, Knox’s weeklong boyfriend that gets pulled into the nightmare that takes four years from their lives.

The director continues the narrative by transferring the whimsy into the reckless speculation of the police investigation – and then transformed again into flawed cause and effect analyses based on speculative rationalizations.

Francesco Acquaroli plays prosecutor Giuliano Mignini, who surmises one too many times about the murder as his team of investigators make one mistake after another in gathering the evidence.

The prosecutor is shown on screen to allow his dreamy speculations to continue to dominate the investigation despite the gaps in the evidence.

A second crime scene next door with blood splatters does not detract from the more sensational results involving the beautiful American.

Amanda mistakenly directs the investigation toward her by making a series of misstatements that are easily disproven, culminating in a written confession that is coerced.

In Episode 2, Leite creates confusion in the scenes leading up to Amanda’s confession, by using a score that sounds like the character’s internal processes and also by merging voices of the police officers over top of each other.

Bits and pieces of a montage flash forward in the background, as if Amanda is deconstructing inside, just as the pressure on her to tell the police what they wanted to hear becomes unbearable.

Episodes are divided into deconstructed parts: one part the police investigation, one part the criminal proceedings, and one part flash backs to the time around the crime and the people that might be involved. Another part is used more sparingly, apparently according to movie magic, as Amanda returns to Italy in real time to face her accuser.

This 8 episode biographical series spins around the acting performance of Grace Van Patten who creates Amanda Knox during many different phases as Amanda creates and recreates herself while time passes, from the naïve love interest to the reckless witness to the wrongfully accused.

Van Patten cleverly creates the emotions that fill the scenes of this constantly changing narrative.

The camera really wants to put together the characters and motivations that created the wrongful conviction and ruined the young lives of the lovers, Amanda and Raffael.

Hair found in the room is determined to belong to a black person. And with very few black people in the small Italian town, Amanda mistakenly accuses the owner of a bar where she works.

Leite keeps everything in context, even the reason for the misstatements, often made with mixed motives, such as emotional diversion to release the pressure.

Amanda looks like a liar to the camera when she tells the police that she does not know any black men, but then she goes to work afterwards, and the bar manager, Patrick, is a black man.

Patrick is proven to be totally innocent. And Amanda is convicted of defamation for the statement that she eventually made, accusing Patrick of the murder.

The sound crew creates the tension of the violent murder that the camera never does show, by creating emotive responses with a speeding moped or the clashing metal of a chained linked basketball net.

Further tension is created as the director wants everyone to feel the confusion that Amanda felt by keeping a lot of the dialogue in Italian. Amanda has only been muddling through her days as a foreign student still learning Italian and still speaking partly in English when the police interview her and take her confession in Italian.

And the camera returns to the crime scene so many times in the first two episodes that the area must have been contaminated by now, but the small Italian town prosecutors continue to collect evidence, nonetheless.

What always seems remarkable through the 8 episodes is that the prosecutor’s office vehemently believe in the correctness of the investigation results, even as they discuss their own mistakes during team meetings.

Every episode is a bit different, but the overall theme of internal and external chaos manifests in different forms through the series.

The camera continually returns to the performance by Van Patten, who has done her research and decided on the character, and then maintains continuity of the character as the script pushes the camera into a few other layers.

The script is based on the autobiography written by Amanda Knox. And so, the perspective is rather subjective, but a compelling watch, nonetheless.

This Hulu production is streaming on Disney+ in Canada.