The Face of an Angel
Director: Michael Winterbottom
Writer: Paul Viragh
Based on: Barbie Latza Nadeau’s book Angel Face: The True Story of Student Killer Amanda Knox
Cast: Daniel Brühl, Kate Beckinsale, Cara Delevingne, Genevieve Gaunt, Lucy Cohu, Ava Acres, Rosie Fellner, Sai Bennett
Seen on: 3.6.2015

Plot:
Thomas (Daniel Brühl) is looking to make a documentary about the murder of a young American exchange student in Italy and the ensuing process against her roommate and fellow exchange student and her boyfriend. Once in Italy he meets with journalist Simone (Kate Beckinsale), who has been covering the entire affair and wrote one of many books about the case. Thomas is looking for an angle to cover the story, which is particularly difficult since there are more opinions about the case, the quality of the police work and the guilt of the accused than can be counted. As he is working on that, he meets the exchange student Melanie (Cara Delevingne) who introduces him to her world.

I am unsure whether The Face of an Angel has the worst script ever, or just an extremely bad script. Either way, I hated it and the entire film with it.

The Face of an Angel is a fictionalized examination of the murder of Meredith Kercher and while I certainly agree that sometimes a fictionalized account can yield a form of truth that a sticking to facts couldn’t possibly provide, I think that the only truth that The Face of an Angel is able to capture is that of a self-involved, narcissitic writer who has to make it all about himself.

Because that’s definitely what the story needed: a story about a female murder victim, based on a book by a female writer, revolving about the guilt – or not – of another woman (and her boyfriend, who takes a definite back seat), that story desperately needs a man at the center of it who is so obsessed with how he can tell the story that he never actually seems to wonder what the story is. A man who is obviously a creative genius, but the rest of the world is too stupid to notice, especially his cheating ex-wife. A man who will wrestle a messy crime case into a self-referential meta script. A man who exploits that story to spew righteous diatribes against exploitative media who sensationalize everything (which Daniel Brühl does beautifully). Talk about bigotted.

The introduction of the manix pixie dream bartender doesn’t help the script or the film either. Not once is it questioned, why an American exchange student would want to hang around with a man who is about twice her age [or how she’d work as a bartender in the first place, as far as I know it’s not particularly easy to get a work permit as an exchange student – but that’s neither here nor there]. Of course she’d want to do that. Of course she’d want to bring him to her student parties and find him drugs and show him Italy as she knows it and give him literature tips. WHY ELSE WOULD SHE BE IN ITALY? At least they refrained from making the entire thing romantic. You have to be grateful for the little things.

The cast was fine, the case is interesting and I think that you could have done a lot with both, maybe even make a film that doesn’t feel like it’s days long – but you’d really need another script for that. One that doesn’t have its head stuck up its pretentious, male ass.

Summarizing: HATE.