All of the names have been changed, but the backstory in The Face of an Angel is clearly that of Amanda Knox, the American exchange student in Italy who was convicted of murdering her British roommate in 2007 and then acquitted four years later. Amanda becomes Jessica Fuller (Genevieve Gaunt), while the victim, Meredith Kercher, becomes Elizabeth Pryce (Sai Bennett), both of whom are seen primarily in gauzy flashbacks that are meant to create direct contrast between the ideals of youth, beauty, and vitality and the brutal nature of murder. Paul Viragh’s screenplay, which is ostensibly based on Barbie Latza Nadeau’s Angel Face: Sex, Murder, and the Inside Story of Amanda Knox, sets up a dichotomy between Thomas (Daniel Brühl), a filmmaker who has been sent to Siena, Italy, to observe the trial as material for what his financial backers assume will be a can’t-lose true-crime thriller, and Simone Ford (Kate Beckinsale), a journalist who has written a book about the murder and becomes Thomas’s ally and adversary. Thomas wants to create art out of the sordid real-life mess; fueled by his reading of Dante’s The Divine Comedy, he becomes intent on creating a “medieval morality play,” as one character calls it, in which the details of the case are but fodder for an esoteric examination of the slippery nature of truth. Simone and the other writers covering the case, most of whom are depicted as soulless denizens of tabloid journalism, are simply interested in the salacious details of sex and violence—the more scandalous the better, of course.

Thomas is increasingly disgusted by such attitudes, and so, by proxy, should we. But, Thomas turns out to be such an unattractive protagonist that it feels unseemly to identify with his concerns, however legitimate they may be. It is established early on that Thomas is struggling in life: his career is sinking, he is separated from his successful actress wife, and his only real lifeline is his preadolescent daughter Bea (Ava Acres), with whom he can connect only briefly via Skype. Brühl is an excellent actor, but here he is left to convey Thomas’s artistic and personal difficulties via a lot of moping and snorting cocaine, which quickly becomes tiresome. Winterbottom generates some tension via his involvement with Edoardo (Valerio Mastandrea), a local who Thomas begins to suspect was involved in the murder, if not directly responsible for it. But much of that tension simply dissipates, despite the inclusion of genuinely weird and unsettling nightmares that merge Thomas’s various anxieties, the facts of the case, and Dante’s Inferno. Eventually the film attempts to find solace by pairing Thomas in a strictly plutonic relationship with Melanie (Cara Delevingne), a pretty young barmaid whose youth and vitality are not marred by tragedy and violence, which allows her to become a kind of saving grace for Thomas. Unfortunately, by that point we aren’t involved enough in Thomas’s morose moral and artistic battles to care much, even when it appears that the forces of banality have won yet again.

Copyright ©2015 James Kendrick

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