The best that can be said of The Face of an Angel is that it’s based around an interesting idea. Instead of dramatising the story of the murder of British student Meredith Kercher in Perugia and what surrounded the case, director Michael Winterbottom has instead fashioned a film in which serial director of flop films Thomas Lang (Daniel Brühl) has arrived in Siena to scope out how to adapt a book on the case, then in its court appeal phase, by American journalist Simone Ford (Kate Beckinsale). For the purposes of The Face of an Angel, Kercher has been renamed Elizabeth Pryce, the accused and subsequently acquitted American student Amanda Knox Jessica Fuller. The film’s title relates to the real book Angel Face, by Barbie Latza Nadeau.
Lang lacks inspiration and has no idea how to make this film. He teams up with Ford and, naturally, sleeps with her. He meets random characters: the press pack covering the case, a British girl working behind a bar (British model Cara Delevingne in her first film role: in more crushing sexism, she strips to her underwear and frolics in the waves off a beach), and a blogging and Machiavellian landlord of student housing who teases the cocaine-sniffing director with case-related titbits.
There is no chemistry and both deliver their lines like robot announcers reciting stops on a tube train
The Face of an Angel is a mess, hard to follow and poorly casted. Brühl looks as though he wishes he wasn't there. Beckinsale sleepwalks and sports a ridiculous American accent. There is no chemistry and both deliver their lines like robot announcers reciting stops on a tube train. Plot markers are silly: both main characters have split from their spouses so, of course, they have sex; Lang decides Dante will be his inspiration so goes, with the presence-less Delevingne, on a quest for the poet's tomb; he moons over pictures of his daughter on a computer screen; there are stilted meetings with the cardboard-character backers of the film he is not making.
The home entertainment release of this faux-meaningful, would-be meta-noir farrago is accompanied by a raft of extras (excised scenes, cast interviews and a behind-the-scenes short), the most painful of which is Winterbottom explaining the film’s intellectual basis. All very well, but it would have been better to ensure The Face of an Angel was intelligible before embarking on its production. Nonsense. Avoid.