“You were commissioned to make a true crime thriller. Are you really saying you’re trying to write a medieval morality tale?” In the past Michael Winterbottom has dealt brilliantly with the horrors of real-life murder (A Mighty Heart), the unpicking of a media myth (24 Hour Party People) and deconstructed the process of storytelling itself (A Cock and Bull Story). All these themes come together in his latest, a fictional work inspired by the murder of Meredith Kercher, to whom the film is dedicated. While the central thesis, that truth can only be told through fiction, is sound (“real truth and justice” having become “just a popularity contest”), this remains too clumsily schematic to get beneath the surface of its subject. Daniel Brühl is unconvincing as the self-obsessed film-maker with personal issues, struggling to tell a story which sidesteps salacious media coverage in favour of something more poetic. Cara Delevingne is unaffectedly natural as the narrative’s symbol of youthful promise, but it’s hard for anyone to make Paul Viragh’s Dante-quoting script ring true. Overemphatic musical cues and dopey CG dream sequences (replete with head-munching serpents) merely accentuate the problems.
