Dramatizing real-life events for the purpose of mass-marketed entertainment always requires a delicate line to be toed, but the inspiration behind Tom McCarthy’s thriller Stillwater wasn’t exactly thrilled at how Hollywood handled a harrowing ordeal.
The story finds Matt Damon’s oil rig worker traveling to France to visit his estranged daughter, who finds herself imprisoned for a murder she’s adamant that she didn’t commit. Naturally, her old man takes his child at face value and attempts to uncover the truth himself, all while facing repeated roadblocks that emerge from both sides of the law as he seeks to exonerate her.
It wasn’t exactly a secret that Stillwater was based on the case of Amanda Knox, who found herself in a near-identical situation when she spent nearly four years in an Italian prison before her conviction for killing Meredith Kercher was overturned, and she released a statement denouncing both the film and its creator for “reinforcing an image of me as a guilty and untrustworthy person.”
Coming under harsh and very public criticism didn’t prevent Stillwater from winning strong reactions from critics, even if the pandemic put paid to any designs it may have on box office success. Either way, it’s continued to be a reliable performer on-demand long after the fact, with FlixPatrol revealing the hard-hitting family tale wrapped up in insurmountable volumes of red tape as one of the most-watched titles on Netflix’s global charts this week.
A straightforward biopic would have arguably generated just as much scorn if not even more, so maybe it was an unwinnable battle from the beginning to get Knox’s approval.