Amanda Knox (2016)

Movie Info

Did she do it? Her own words…

On  November 2, 2007, the discovery of the body of twenty-one-year-old Meredith Kercher in her room started a media storm.  Kercher had been brutally slaughtered and the bloody crime was soon linked by police to Kercher’s roommate Amanda Knox.  The investigation and trial sparked headlines around the world as an international battle developed over Amanda.  Did Knox do it…and if not, who did?

Directed by Rod Blackhurst and Brian McGinn, Amanda Knox is a Netflix original documentary.  The documentary premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival and premiered on Netflix on September 30, 2016.

While many were obsessed with Amanda Knox, I kind of avoided the whole thing.  I’ve been overseas on an exchange and know that it can be odd and trying…but I can’t imagine having the addition of a foreign language and a murder involved.  The situation wasn’t a good one, and the behavior of most of the parties involved just made it worse.

Face of a killer?

The documentary leaves you wondering how it got so far.  The situation was just one that seemed like error after error that led to more and more problems.  The documentary doesn’t end up diving too much into who the murderer might have really been (Rudy Guede is the most pointed to figure).  The documentary is more a presentation of how things seemed to get out of control.

Amanda Knox comes off as somewhat sympathetic, though as people pointed out about her at the time, something does seem off about her personality.  Her behavior during the trial and around the murder isn’t the behavior of one who just had a “friend” or at least a roommate violently killed in the room right next to where you slept for weeks, but with a majority of the world not having experienced that situation, it is hard to judge how each person would react.  The police are presented as people who are a bit too fast to judgment and caught up in the chaos.

Freed!

The person who really comes off poorly in this documentary is reporter Nick Pisa and the press in general.  Pisa’s behavior in the documentary is bizarre…first equating big headlines to sex and then blaming the police for taking these headlines into consideration when they are looking at Amanda and Raffaele Sollecito as suspects.  He can’t say how he got this “secret diary” of “Foxy Knoxy” and he also just seems to get off in just being included in the documentary.

Amanda Knox is an interesting case study of a trial.  It isn’t the best documentary you’ll ever see, but it worth seeing how a murder can become an international incident and the events that led up to the crisis.  Knox herself presents a great question at the beginning of the film.  You can believe she’s a psychotic murderer or you can believe she is a victim of one of the immense travesties of justice…the documentary does a decent job letting you make that call.