Film

Now would be the perfect moment for Lindsay Lohan to knock us out with the kind of performance she’s capable of. As it happens, the bizarre thriller I Know Who Killed Me is ten times more fascinating as an accidental piece of private exposure, one that ends with Lohan literally digging her own grave to find another dark-haired, husky starlet staring up at her.

A hallucinatory psychodrama that owes more to Mulholland Drive than to Captivity, the movie has Lohan straddling two roles (as in life): Good girl Aubrey, a piano student and football player’s crush, suffers a particularly gruesome abduction that costs her an arm and a leg; she then takes on the identity of bad girl Dakota, a former pole dancer and man-eater. Aubrey’s parents tear themselves apart during her unraveling, detectives scowl, and “Dakota” decides to hobble her way to her torturer’s identity.

The hard-R imagery is filled with feverish symbols of lost potency: multiple hand-loppings, a hairless cat, Lohan’s own excessive profanity and desperate grinding. I don’t attribute a creative intelligence to such a perfect match of material and actor—how would Lohan even know to choose it? But this will undoubtedly be the key film of her career: a scared expression of total meltdown.