Amanda Knox (2016)

Rod Blackhurst's 2016 documentary arrives with the calm of a case file and the patience of a court clerk. It walks us through the 2007 murder of Meredith Kercher, the interrogation of Amanda Knox, the four years in an Italian prison, and the eventual acquittal. The interviews are the draw: Knox herself, Raffaele Sollecito, prosecutor Giuliano Mignini, and a Daily Mail reporter who seems pleased with his work. The film is absorbing the way a well-organized evidence folder is absorbing. Nobody raises their voice. Nobody has to.

The film gestures at the tabloid construction of Knox as a sexualized curiosity, the Foxy Knoxy nickname, the salacious headlines, the appetite for a pretty young woman cast as a monster. That is a real observation, and the film makes it. Then it stops. The observation sits on the table like an unopened envelope. We get the sexism as texture, one more strange detail of the case, not as an argument about how women are tried in public. The documentary has other business.

Rudy Guede appears in the story, an Ivorian immigrant convicted in the same murder, and the film lets him pass through without a word about what his treatment might reveal. That is not the documentary's subject. Its subject is the machinery of a wrongful conviction and the odd psychology of being publicly hated. Some implicit critique of the press is present, but the film never mounts a podium. It shows, it withholds, and it trusts us to draw the line. The restraint is to its credit and also its limitation. A sober, well-made film about a lurid story, and one that mostly declines to tell us what to think.