Past Misdeeds: I Know Who Killed Me (2007)

Through the transformation of the glorious WTF-Films into the even more glorious Exploder Button and the ensuing server changes, some of my old columns for the site have gone the way of all things internet. I’m going to repost them here in irregular intervals in addition to my usual ramblings.

Please keep in mind these are the old posts presented with only  basic re-writes and improvements. Furthermore, many of these pieces were written years ago, so if you feel offended or need to violently disagree with me in the comments, you can be pretty sure I won’t know why I wrote what I wrote anymore anyhow.

Teen Aubrey Fleming (Lindsay Lohan) is living a charmed life - she's bright, wealthy, has a supportive family, and could have all the jock boyfriends she could handle; all reasons for her not to be perfectly happy are hidden quite well or perfectly obvious after this description. Then one day she disappears, probably the third victim of a serial killer.

Unlike your usual victim of a serial killer, however, Aubrey reappears quite alive, if without her right hand and parts of her right leg. Her abductor's earlier victims suggest he is into torture through amputation before he kills his victims, so this isn't completely surprising, if horrible. The police assumes Aubrey must somehow have escaped from her tormentor and just made it close enough to a road to be noticed.

But the returned Aubrey says she isn't Aubrey at all but an exotic dancer called Dakota Moss; she also claims not to be able to describe anything about her tormentor, and to barely remember anything at all, if with a reluctance that suggests she might not be telling the whole truth. Everyone is convinced Aubrey has developed some choice delusions to protect herself from her traumatic experience - the FBI in childishly annoyed ways that surely would help no traumatized victim open up, Aubrey's family with a mixture of horror and a willingness to get through this thing too, somehow, whatever "this thing" actually is.

However, Aubrey/Dakota hasn't even told anyone the truly strange parts of her story, something so unbelievable it looks she and her shiny new high class prosthetics (medicine is surprisingly fast on the film's planet) will have to catch the serial killer themselves.

I suspect the general hatred for Chris Sivertson's I Know Who Killed Me is based on the general hatred for lead actress Lindsay Lohan, something I neither share nor care for, since nothing I know of Lohan's public life suggests anything more than the not atypical story of somebody growing up in public and becoming troubled and somewhat self-destructive, which certainly aren't things deserving of hatred in my world. That "compassion" thing I heard about once might be a more appropriate reaction, but of course, if there's one thing left and right, the “woke” and bigots have in common right now, it's their pleasure in judgement and talking down to people instead of making even the tiniest attempt at empathy or developing tolerance for any imperfections in others.

Be that as it may, and leaving Lohan's (who gives a perfectly decent performance here, and if that's the sort of performance deserving a Razzie, the people responsible for that award should probably watch actually bad performances from time to time) public image aside, I Know Who Killed Me looks to me like the sort of film everyone who'd be interested in a (relatively) contemporary US variation on the giallo should take a look at when she's through the films of Brian De Palma, whose shadow seems to hang over the film in more than one scene.

I Know Who Killed Me is not at all interested in "realism", or in being the kind of thriller whose plot would be even vaguely probable in real life, or even just sound probable as fiction. Rather, Sivertson's film attempts to create a dream world, a filmic place where visual metaphors (some so very, very blunt as to make Eisenstein blush, some surprisingly subtle) are more important than plot logic. For my tastes, Sivertson is very good at this sort of thing, using surprisingly complex and meaningful colour schemes, gliding camera work, and the sudden influx of the fantastic and the bizarre into the semi-reality of the film, all in the service of creating a fictional place and a mood that enables him to talk about how difficult it is to be a young woman right now, quite independently of class, or talent, or just blind luck. One might suggest that this theme rather fits the film's lead actress, but hey, what do I know?

If I Know Who Killed Me only consisted of these elements, it would be a rather easy film to digest and love, but Sivertson adds even more to the mix: there are moments when the dream mood becomes a fairy tale mood (see also the classic fairy tale trope about lost siblings), moments of Lifetime Channel type melodrama awkwardly rubbing against the rest of the film, rather too coy sleaziness (the stripping and the sex feel more than just a little absurd thanks to that), and a sense of dry humour that pops up in the most unexpected places. It's a bit of an overload of contradictory impulses, and certainly doesn't help make the film an easily digestible whole. It does, on the other hand, create something of a feeling of more going on behind the film's curtains than one at first suspects, suggesting a complexity of ambition behind the film I'm still not sure is actually there. What it definitely leaves a viewer with is room for copious divergent interpretations of hidden meanings, which is always a fun game to play with a film inviting one to it.


Of course, this tonal inconsistency drawing me to I Know Who Killed Me like Socks to catnip is exactly what will drive a lot of people away from the film. Any given viewer will find more than one moment in it either impressively imaginative or strained to the point of inadvertent comedy; I don't believe anyone watching will be left neutral. As should be obvious, I found myself impressed more often than not, and appreciated the film's more dubious moments because to me, these moments look like the result of a film actually taking risks, and often strange risks to boot, instead of going the easy route of just being a very standard thriller.