In Defense of I Know Who Killed Me
With its star under distress and woefully misleading marketing, the 2007 film never stood a chance at the box office. Here's why it should be reconsidered as the piece of auteur Giallo cinema it is.
[Welcome to In Defense of the Flop, a new Top Shelf, Low Brow series looking back at infamous (and some not so memorable) critically reviled flop films that we feel are worth reconsidering. This week: I Know Who Killed Me.]
What do two Real Housewives, a couple of bionic limbs, early viral YouTube sensation LonelyGirl15, stigmata, handblown glass, and a former Hollywood It Girl have in common? They’re all in I Know Who Killed Me, one of the most sensationally wacky—and unfairly maligned—films of the 21st century.
The film, about a young woman who goes missing while a killer is on the loose only to reappear sans a couple of body parts and claiming to be a different person entirely, famously stars Lindsay Lohan in a dual role, playing both Aubrey Fleming and Dakota Moss. Lohan leaps between personalities—the virginal good girl and gifted pianist Aubrey and the icy, foul-mouthed exotic dancer Dakota—to great effect. Joining her is Garcelle Beauvais as an FBI detective, Kenya Moore as a stripper with three lines, and a whole host of other dangerous, cryptic side characters who are present not so much to advance the plot but to serve as perplexing distractions until they’re tossed aside whenever the film needs to pull its focus back onto Lohan.
In hindsight, it seems impossible that a film like I Know Who Killed Me could ever be released without being absolutely lambasted by the media. This is the kind of project that takes a decade or so to come into even the smallest bit of sincere reverence, in part because it bucks any filmmaking trends or conventions to be so solely audacious that it’s impossible to understand if you’re looking for something purely sensical. Because it was marketed as a horror film and because they were more interested in lampooning Lohan in reviews, critics failed to look beyond the film’s few grisly scenes for any artistic merit. I Know Who Killed Me was immediately written off as drivelous torture porn, a total nadir for everyone involved, particularly its star. It quickly stumbled out of theaters, but not before receiving the first-ever “F” rating on CinemaScore from audiences. But here’s the thing: I Know Who Killed Me is good.
Now, our definitions of good might differ here. If you haven’t seen the film (and even if you have), you might think I’m saying the film is so bad it’s good, so insane and ludicrously plotted that you can’t help but enjoy it for the wackadoo piece of fauxteur cinema it simply is. And on some levels that’s true. But I believe I Know Who Killed Me, while weighted by some undeniable problems, is truly an ambitious piece of surrealism cinema that deserves a revisit and some hefty reconsideration.
I am, admittedly, a longtime Lindsay Lohan fan. I fell in love with The Parent Trap when I was four years old, and though my dedication has considerably and rightfully waned over the last decade of her career, I’m always interested to see what she’ll offer. I was there Thanksgiving weekend for the Lifetime network television premiere of Liz & Dick. I watched her horrific return to film, Among The Shadows, and paired it with a few episodes of MTV’s Lohan Beach Club. You never know when a fallen star will explode with light once more, ready to come back as a supernova. Lohan was arguably the most deserving of the 2000s tabloid It Girls (aside from Britney Spears, of course), she actually has considerable talent. Pair that with a healthy dose of impalpable je ne sais quoi and an unmistakable It Factor, and her presence instantly captivates audiences and critics alike. In fact, her performance was about the only thing that critics lauded from Paul Schrader’s 2013 L.A. noir The Canyons—though, I was lucky enough to see the film in theaters early last year in conversation with Schrader, and can say that it certainly has worn its years well.
Although a fan of Lohan, I came to I Know Who Killed Me late. I was just 13 when it was released in theaters, and despite my begging, my parents believed its themes were too mature for me. That didn’t stop me from memorizing every line, edit, and music cue in the trailer, though. I watched it religiously the summer of 2007, hungry to see my most favorite star take on a role unlike any other she had played before. But it wasn’t until four years later, when I was bedridden and recovering from wisdom tooth surgery, that I remembered it remained unchecked in my Lohan filmography. I watched it still a bit loopy on pain medication and found that the more gruesome scenes were a bit too hard to watch while I was still bleeding out from my gums. Though I had to look away at times, I found it to be an enthralling watch, even if it didn’t entirely make sense to me. I didn’t watch it again until autumn of 2019 when I decided to stay home and devour a Hawaiian pizza while my boyfriend went to go see Parasite in theaters. Saying you’re going to stay behind from one of the most critically acclaimed films of the year to watch a movie that is almost universally reviled is certainly a choice, but it’s one I made with pride. In the years since my first viewing, I had taken in hordes of surrealist horror, auteur cinema, and delicious Italian Giallo. Suddenly, I Know Who Killed Me opened itself up to me as something much more than laughably bad horror—it was an avant-garde vision; a rich, modern Giallo disguised by the press and its marketing as gratuitous torture porn, too ahead of its time to be properly understood.
Of course, the trailer serves the actual film poorly, that is, unless you’re a 2000s horror-head, in which you may be duped into thinking this would be your standard When a Stranger Calls-remake-esque popcorn thriller. I give the editor some due, though, it can’t be easy to effectively take a modern psychological Giallo and market it as a sexy slasher, which I’d wager is what execs at TriStar Pictures thought they were buying. I can’t blame audiences for feeling tricked when they went into theaters thinking they were getting a stripper-in-suspense flick and instead were served a hyper-colorful and largely metaphorical piece of film that has more in common with Lynch’s Mulholland Drive and Cronenberg’s Dead Ringers than, say, the 2005 Paris Hilton-starring remake of House of Wax.
The aughts were largely a period of horror remakes and uninspired slashers that were intent on titillating audiences with blonde gossip girls in scantily clad, torturous peril. Initially, it seemed as though I Know Who Killed Me was poised to fall into that same pattern, casting the most troubled starlet of them all as an exotic dancer—a role that stirred up celeb gossip forum posts and tabloid blurbs so objectifying and cruel that they’d be canceled in seconds in today’s world. But the film’s perceived scandalous nature was simply a herring as red as the neon-lit stages Lohan so briefly dances on. The film is reasonably tame, especially by 2000s R-rated horror standards. Its only sex scene is played more for laughs, with cuts to Aubrey/Dakota’s mother Susan (Julia Ormond) furiously scrubbing kitchen counters to block out the noise. And, much like Carrie Bradshaw, the bra stays on—no exceptions! The highly-publicized strip club scenes, of which there are only two, are a little more gratuitous, but never feel exploitative. Lohan is always highly in-character and in control, commanding her stage with a wicked fearlessness in her eyes that conveys Dakota’s worn soul before she ever utters a word.
The film wouldn’t be half as captivating without Lohan, whose sheer presence buoys it to the surface. How ironic that her performance was the subject of so much scrutiny when, without her, I Know Who Killed Me would’ve been forgotten long ago, not even interesting enough to achieve cult status. Say what you will about Lohan, but in almost all of her film work—when and if she showed up to set—she arrived ready to perform. Still, I Know Who Killed Me was plagued by Lohan’s attachment from before principle production even began. Intrigue swirled when Lohan revealed toward the end of 2006 that she’d been taking pole dancing classes (you may remember the brief celebrity obsession with The S Factor by Sheila Kelley) in preparation for the film. The paparazzi, in their typically morally vacuous fashion, were hungry to catch images of then 20-year old Lohan on a pole. Then, when filming began in January 2007, Lohan was hospitalized with exhaustion, followed by an appendectomy, followed by a stint in rehab, all highly publicized and occurring within weeks of each other. Both the public and the press were rooting for her downfall, just take a look at the archived comments on this Us Weekly post announcing Lohan’s rehab stint. But despite it all, Lohan didn’t shirk her commitments and continued filming under the supervision of her rehab facility. In a promotional video for Lohan’s April 2007 GQ shoot, she spoke with interviewer Marshall Sella via BBM from set. “Ummmmm 30 days sober today :),” read one text. “Been working so hard…at a graveyard filming through the night. eek,” read another.
After production wrapped in March 2007, the film was quickly turned around and ready to be in theaters by that summer. On July 24, just three days prior to the film’s scheduled July 27 release, Lohan was arrested on suspicion of driving under the influence and possession of cocaine after getting into a verbal argument with a former assistant and chasing her in an SUV, driving with a license suspended from a prior arrest for similar charges two months earlier. Not even the splashy headlines about tawdry misbehavior were enough to save the film’s opening weekend, which wrapped with $3.5 million — absolutely dreadful, especially by Lohan’s standards. Critics’ reviews were more focused on Lindsay Lohan the troubled starlet than Lindsay Lohan the purported actress; writeups emphasized Lohan’s penchant for self-destruction more than any aspects of her actual performance.
What critics unfortunately failed to see is that Lindsay Lohan’s painful public battle with addiction and substance abuse is actually an integral part of what makes I Know Who Killed Me so compelling. As Aubrey Fleming and Dakota Moss, Lohan oscillates between a rational, promising young talent and her id, a woman who does exactly what she wants whenever she wants to. Jeff Hammond’s screenplay holds a mirror to Lohan the Hollywood ingenue, publicly struggling as she’s pulled between being a celebrated actress or a cautionary tale, and challenging her to find happiness somewhere in the middle. The film roots for her. Here, in her last big-budget studio film before her serious acting career is derailed, Lindsay Lohan recalls the film that made her a star. I Know Who Killed Me finds her playing another set of twins, just like her debut in The Parent Trap. After a decade in the industry, Lohan found herself back where she started, but on the edge of a cliff. Now, it was up to her whether or not to jump.
Lohan’s own trajectory is felt through Aubrey and Dakota equally, with expressions of pain and beauty that linger in every frame, culminating in the film’s final shot. It’s a moment that’s imbued with such rich subtext that it gives the film an eerie prescience, lending to director Chris Sivertson’s vision of a macabre, suburban Giallo fairytale.
However, that vision and Sivertson’s willingness to wear his references on his sleeve are what results in such mixed reactions to the film, even over a decade later. I Know Who Killed Me is a film lover’s paradise, which isn’t to say that it can’t be enjoyed by a casual viewer, but having some context for its stylistic inspirations and being able to appreciate the director’s expressions of them certainly enhances the experience. The film’s vivid, saturated coloring felt unnecessary and hamfisted to me when I first watched it. I didn’t understand the purpose of the dissolves into blue and red other than that the colors were representative of Aubrey and Dakota’s distinct personality contrasts, but now realize that the film borrows this captivating visual aesthetic from classic Italian Giallo, using stark coloring to enhance the surreal, dreamlike atmosphere. That surrealism is exactly the kind of thing that turned audiences off in 2007. They expected torture porn and excessively steamy pole dancing scenes but instead were given biblical-level stigmata and bionic limbs that would run out of battery if left without a charge for too long. To those unfamiliar with the work of David Lynch, Brian De Palma, and David Cronenberg, who Sivertson has cited as inspirations, these things would not only seem superfluous but stupid. And if you’re watching looking for a laugh or two, you’ll find it. But viewing with a more discerning eye is ultimately more rewarding than relegating I Know Who Killed Me to nonsensical drivel.
Hell, I’d go as far as to say that it’s a film so ahead of its time it’s actually a bit baffling. Ten years after the film’s release, David Lynch released Twin Peaks: The Return, a revisit to the director’s most beloved series of work, with which he was given completely free rein by Showtime. The result was 17 hours of much darker, much weirder television than anyone could’ve expected—even diehard fans, at times, felt frustrated by it. But the intrinsic surreality of The Return is what makes one of the most dazzling, enthralling pieces of visual art ever made. It’s proof that if you give yourself over to a director’s vision, you might find style and subtext to be as richly rewarding as any neatly-solved mystery, perhaps even more so. In fact, a major theme within Twin Peaks lore is a blue rose, a symbol for something that does not exist in nature. I Know Who Killed Me borrows the blue rose as one of the main symbols for Aubrey Fleming’s purity, a trait that can’t be extricated from her dual natures, unable to exist fully without her other side.
I’m not foolish, I Know Who Killed Me is not on par with Twin Peaks: The Return, but both works exist within similar artistic spaces. They’re ballsy and visionary, sometimes to a fault but never in a way that makes them less interesting. Maybe someday in the future, the film’s cult status that has since made it a burgeoning classic midnight movie will be enough to warrant the release of Sivertson’s director’s cut, but the one we have now is more than good enough. Though I Know Who Killed Me certainly suffers from its problems (rushed exposition, some weak dialogue, inconsistent pacing), it’s time to remove it from the pantheon of infamously bad movies, at least not the kind of “bad” it was saddled with supposedly being upon its release—the kind that’s boring, unimaginative, and unoriginal—three things that I Know Who Killed Me never is.
Thank you so much for writing this! I read it when it initially came out, but just wanted to comment and mention how it inspired me to write my own essay about IKWKM on my own Substack.