The Face Of An Angel, film review: Split verdict on a murder inspired by Meredith Kercher's case

(15) Dir. Michael Winterbottom; Starring Daniel Brühl, Cara Delevingne, 101mins

Daniel Brühl in The Face of an Angel

Michael Winterbottom's new film is based on the true-crime book Angel Face: Sex, Murder and the Inside Story of Amanda Knox, in the same way that his 2005 comedy A Cock and Bull Story was based on Tristram Shandy. That's to say, it's got an evasive and recursive narrative, all about a film-maker failing to make a film about a murder case like the one covered by the book.

Daniel Brühl plays the director's stand-in, Thomas, who is welcomed by the book's author's stand-in, a US journalist (Kate Beckinsale), to the media circus that envelops the trial in Siena of pretty US student Jessica Fuller (Genevieve Gaunt) for the murder of pretty English student Elizabeth Pryce (Sai Bennett). Thomas doesn't want to do a simple reconstruction, he explains. He has grand theories about our obsession with murder stories. He wants to make "a detective story in a world without God". He wants to invoke Dante's Inferno. His UK producers, meanwhile, envisage a different kind of film; one with "two great parts for young women... Carey Mulligan would be good".

Winterbottom gives a righteous and enjoyable savaging to the media-workers for whom the murder of a young woman means firstly a meal ticket, and then good fodder for dinner-party chatter. But while the film may be generally smart and sensitive, the film-maker at its centre is off-puttingly self-righteous and self-involved. The conflating of his own recent separation from his wife and daughter with the loss of a murdered girl's family feels misjudged, while his mental breakdown, which is characterised by paranoid suspicions and visions from the Inferno, feels like an indulgence. A little less authorial distance might have resulted in a more salacious film, but also perhaps a more involving one.