DIRECTED BY: Rod Blackhurst and Brian McGinn
SYNOPSIS
American exchange student Amanda Knox is convicted and eventually acquitted for the 2007 death of another student in Italy.
Amanda Knox is a Netflix documentary that looks on the case of an American woman who spent four years in prison in Italy as she was found guilty of the murder of Meredith Kercher in 2007, an English woman she shared an apartment with. Later she was acquitted by the Supreme Court of Cassation. The documentary looks back over the case, including head interviews with Amanda Knox, her boyfriend at the time who was also put in prison for Meredith’s murder, Raffaele Sollecito, lead prosecutor Giuliano Mignini and journalist Nick Pisa.
The name Amanda Knox was well known during 2007 after the murder of Meredith Kercher and thanks to the media at the time, she and her boyfriend at the time, Raffaele Sollecito became well-known names and pretty much everyone had an opinion on the trial before the verdict was read, with Knox’s life being laid out there for all to read/see through the media. If you already had your perception of finding Amanda Knox guilty or not guilty, does this documentary go out of its way to change your point of view?
Amanda Knox documentary tells the story in a way that if you’re a person unfamiliar with the case, it will unfold the details before the murder, right through to the verdict at the trial and the appeals that followed in a manner that it is easy to digest. The documentary keenly looks at how the media handled the case, particularly using Nick Pisa who gleefully reminisces about the headlines he made about the case (for The Daily Mail at the time) in such a brutally honest way about the agenda he set out to achieve during the proceedings of the case that I’m sure many people will come to loathe him after watching this documentary. Similarly they may look at lead prosecutor Giuliano Mignini in the same way, though his conclusions such as him creating this clear picture of how he believed the murder came to be and his perception of Amanda as a person due to her ‘lifestyle’ (i.e being sexually active) puts him into the same line that he describes Amanda as someone that ‘mixed dream with reality’. The head interview clips of Amanda Know herself are interesting to watch as she details her life before and after the murder of Mereditch Kercher.
While the documentary goes through the overall coverage of the case, trial and appeal, it unfortunately doesn’t really give the viewer much new material than what some of us have already known, besides inside footage of the investigation inside apartment of the murder scene and how the CSI’s and prosecutors completely messed up the murder scene, leading to the appeals being successful and Knox and Sollecito being acquitted. Because the fact that they were both cleared of the murder of Meredith Kercher, the documentary will appear pretty much one-sided in its appearance of siding with Amanda’s innocence in the case rather than create a divided viewpoint for the viewer that didn’t have any view on the case before/came in with a fresh set of eyes and caught this documentary. Unfortunately, which is sometimes the case with these crime documentaries, the victim is nothing more than a mere footnote to set us down a path of hearing their ‘journey’ through the course of the case and yet Meredith Kercher’s story is trimmed to the bare minimum here, as is featuring her family, though her mother makes an appearance towards the end and feeling sympathy for the family not getting the clear resolution they needed to move forward rather than the circus that followed.
VERDICT
It’s not the best crime documentary you’ll see as it is more one-sided in its execution that they probably don’t want you to think it is. The interviews from Giuliano Mignini and Nick Pisa are what make this documentary worth watching. If you already had a view of whether Amanda Knox was guilty or not, I doubt that this documentary would sway your opinion either way. 6/10
Irish Cinephile 