Review by Joshua Rothkopf
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.
