This unedifying documentary adds little to the existing welter of books and films about the 2007 murder of Meredith Kercher in Perugia, and the subsequent media storm and legal farrago embracing her blameless friends Amanda Knox and Raffaele Sollecito.
Producer/director Michael Rudin’s two-parter for Paramount+ features no meaningful new evidence and of the major figures in the case only Sollecito and prosecutor Giuliano Mignini are interviewed.
Kercher’s parents are now dead and her siblings have in the past decried the constant fascination with their sister’s death, so raking it up again can’t be justified in their name. This is prurience, framed as a commentary on prurience.
On November 2, 2007 Kercher, an exchange student from Coulsdon, was found dead in her locked bedroom in the first-floor student flat she shared with Amanda Knox and two female Italian students.
She had been stabbed 47 times and had suffocated on her own blood after her throat was cut. Bloody fingerprints on the walls and faeces in a toilet identified a drifter and sometime burglar called Rudy Guede, whose DNA was also found inside Kercher’s body.
A broken window, the theft of cash and credit cards, and Guede’s own past modus operandi suggested a burglary that turned into a rape and murder. But prosecutors including Mignini, apparently incensed that Knox and Sollecito were insufficiently grief-stricken by Kercher’s death, constructed a scenario wherein they and Guede killed Kercher for refusing to take part in an orgy. This was, and remains, entirely unsupported by any evidence.
Knox and Sollecito, terribly young and only newly a couple, and both perhaps cursed with a manner that seemed smug or insouciant, were brutally interrogated: Knox was told she’d tested positive for HIV, to con her into listing her sexual partners. Guede was sentenced to 30 years for murder and sexual assault in a fast-track trial that exempted him from appearing at Knox and Sollecito’s hearings.
A frenzied media took sides and the couple’s social profiles were mined for incriminating matter. Pro and anti-Knox factions grew online: the first book about her was published before the couple’s trial in 2009. Both were convicted, only to be acquitted in 2011 and then retried and acquitted again in 2015, partly due to slapdash evidence-gathering.
There’s an interesting but fleeting suggestion here that the case represented an early example of online polarisation and the weaponising of lies. The facts and the fantasies that have swirled around it in the past 14 years are clearly explained and Rudin’s programme is not particularly sensational. What’s notable is what’s missing.
Kercher’s family clearly declined to take part. Knox is only heard in narrated sections of her own audiobook and in a 2021 BBC interview. The gaps between interviews with Sollecito, Mignini, various forensic and legal specialists and Kercher’s vicar are therefore filled by journalists who reported on and/or wrote books about the case. With no new facts, talking heads on both sides are left to argue about whether the prosecution or the acquittal was the real travesty of justice.
Rudin promises two coups that come to nothing. We’re told that Knox and Mignini had a reconciliatory meeting, but not what was said. Guede was released in 2021 and still protests his innocence: the film-makers track him down but capture him only in a hazy, audio-free medium shot.
One comes away from this documentary feeling slightly soiled but also filled with compassion for Knox and Sollecito and even for Guede, whose grim early life is sketched out. But most of all for Kercher, seen again in all-too-familiar snatches of footage, forced to walk again like a ghost through her own tragedy.
