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The missing piece of Hulu’s strange new Amanda Knox docudrama

2 0
14.08.2025

If ever true crime had a “household name,” that name might be Amanda Knox. Forever immortalized as an inadvertent yet infamous media darling, Knox has weathered the storm of being tried, convicted, imprisoned, freed, retried, and ultimately found innocent of the 2007 murder of her British roommate Meredith Kercher.

Knox, a Seattle native, was just 20 when she briefly lived with Kercher and two other roommates in the idyllic cliffside house in Perugia, Italy, where Kercher was murdered. Despite a glaring lack of evidence against her from the start (and overwhelming evidence against the man who actually did it), Knox became a publicly reviled figure who still generates suspicion across two continents. Since her exoneration, she’s chosen to meet that suspicion head-on, participating in a documentary, writing memoirs, and speaking out about how the media demonized her and how the justice system nearly failed her.

All of this has led to her newest project, The Twisted Tale of Amanda Knox, an eight-episode Hulu docudrama created by K.J. Steinberg (This Is Us) and co-produced by Knox, retelling her story from her perspective. While true crime biopics are everywhere these days, there’s something particularly strange about this one, which sees Grace van Patten as a wide-eyed, winsome, fourth-wall-breaking Amanda. The show’s director, Michael Uppendahl, deliberately plays with tonal shifts, seesawing between the quirky, twee aesthetic of Amelie, the film Knox and her boyfriend were watching the night of the murder, and the claustrophobia of interrogation rooms and grief of tearful family meltdowns. The result is something that feels almost unholy — like The Staircase meets Fleabag, two things that should probably never meet!

As with Hulu’s other recent true crime-ish docudrama about Natalia Grace, Twisted Tale takes a granular approach to its storytelling, canvassing a huge amount of detail even as the narrative spans years. It also takes on a very close point of view through Knox’s perspective — which may explain why the narrative glosses over one of the most well-known aspects of this case: If this tale is twisted, who exactly twisted it?

Whatever you think you know about this case, you don’t know the half

Because we rarely shift out of Knox’s viewpoint in Twisted Tale, many of the more famous aspects of the case become offstage concerns. The media’s obsession with “Foxy Knoxy” — the main lens through which most Americans would have absorbed the Amanda Knox story — gets reduced to a passing remark between unnamed journalists. The public’s obsession with the case is also kept firmly at arm’s length; fictional Amanda doesn’t even open the hordes of fan mail she receives in prison.

The elevation of so many personal details and relationships inevitably leads to the fast-tracking of many other details about the case, including years of pretty bonkers information about the investigation, prosecution, and ongoing media frenzy. The result is that casual viewers, and even viewers who think they already know where this is headed, might be left frantically Googling case facts to convince themselves they just heard that correctly.

Spoiler: You did.

Yes, in Italy, the prosecutor also runs the police investigation. Yes, the prosecutor in this case, Giuliano Mignini (Francesco Acquaroli), had an

© Vox