Amanda Knox’s story has never been told like this before

Most of us know what happened to Amanda Knox, the then-20-year-old American exchange student who was wrongly charged with the murder of her British housemate Meredith Kercher in 2007 Perugia, Italy. But few understand why and how that prosecution came to pass: the confluence of media frenzy and misogyny that led to her being dubbed “Foxy Knoxy” and spending four years in prison.

Disney+’s dramatisation, The Twisted Tale of Amanda Knox, strives to fill those gaps with characterful colour – and in the first two episodes, shows every sign of succeeding.

Returning home from her boyfriend Raffaele Sollecito’s place, Amanda (Grace Van Patten, Tell Me Lies) obliviously showers before noticing blood on the bathmat, excrement in the toilet, and that her roommate Meredith’s door is locked. She calls Raffaele for help and then the police, who discover a broken window and Meredith’s body. After some intense questioning – sometimes in her second language – Amanda finds she has transitioned from key witness to prime suspect.

Knox herself is among the executive producers, so it’s unsurprising that The Twisted Tale of Amanda Knox tries to humanise the woman at its centre. The script masterfully shows how crossed wires and confirmation bias amounted to her downfall (“there was something about Amanda that made Meredith uneasy,” says one of Meredith’s friends to police). All credit, too, to Van Patten, who is excellent at portraying Knox’s eccentric Americanisms – a little “tah-dah” flourish after putting on shoe protectors for a walk-through of the murder scene, for instance – that turn the stony-faced Italian investigators against her.

The portrayal of the police officers – who spend most of their screen time skulking around in badly lit interrogation rooms – is altogether less sympathetic. But while their villainy verges on cartoonish, it’s at least in-keeping with the rest of the show’s stylised tone: apparently an homage to Amélie, Knox’s favourite film, and also her alibi for the night of the murder, when she was watching it with Raffaele.

Injections of kookiness – a voiceover introducing characters by their likes and dislikes, a map of Italy coming to life as Amanda imagines travelling through it – are undoubtedly unusual for what is essentially a crime thriller, not to mention occasionally distracting. They contrast with the show’s grittier themes while illuminating Amanda’s own perspective. She was, after all, a carefree young woman on the adventure of a lifetime before tragedy struck.

Meanwhile, flashes forward – to 2022, when Amanda is returning to Italy in secret – mean that the tension between the light and macabre is echoed in its dual timeframes as well as its tone. With episode two drawing to a close, the purpose of this second Italian adventure revealed in one timeline, and Amanda’s mother arriving in Perugia in the other, the stage is set for a riveting collision of past and present.

No doubt, The Twisted Tale of Amanda Knox is ambitious – in terms of its structure, characterisation, and agenda of setting a long-warped record straight. But the series’ first two instalments rise elegantly to meet these high standards. And although later episodes threaten to lose that focus, the series must be commended for its courage as well as the richness of its storytelling.

Despite its protagonist’s infamy at the time of her prosecution, and several iterations of her story being released since (Amanda Knox: Murder on Trial in Italy in 2011 and Matt Damon’s Knox inspired 2021 film Stillwater, besides two memoirs and a Netflix documentary), nothing thus far in Twisted Tale feels stale or rehashed.

Rather, its all-encompassing embrace of Knox’s subjectivity allows viewers personal access to a story whose initial wrong-telling hypnotised the world. This version shows every sign of being even more scintillating than that erroneous original.

‘The Twisted Tale of Amanda Knox’ is streaming on Disney+. New episodes stream every Wednesday