AFTER eight years, the murder of British student Meredith Kercher in Italy is still making headlines and remains unresolved.

Yet Michael Winterbottom’s film, inspired by her killing and Barbie Latza Nadeau’s book about Amanda Knox who stood trial for Meredith’s murder, sheds no new insight.

Instead, this fictionalised drama, fascinating but exasperating in turn, explores the media circus and the public’s obsession with this violent story.

It centres on washed-up film-maker Thomas Lang (Daniel Bruhl) who travels to Siena to make a film — based on a book by US journalist Simone Ford (Kate Beckinsale) — about the controversial trial of US student Jessica Fuller (Genevieve Gaunt) for the murder of her flatmate Elizabeth Pryce (Sai Bennett).

But Lang is plagued by a story with too many angles and when he considers Dante’s Divine Comedy as a structure for his screenplay it feels like he and Winterbottom have both lost the plot.

The film’s flaw is that the murder story is relegated to the background and it sits on the fence as to who the killer of Pryce/Meredith is.

I couldn’t help but feel that the Kercher family deserves better.