Aubrey Fleming (Lindsay Lohan, Mean Girls) is the perfect teenage daughter.  She lives the ideal life in a small town with her loving parents (Julia Ormond, First Knight and Neal McDonough, Flags of our Fathers).  She is a piano prodigy and has already been accepted to Yale on the strength of her fiction writing skills.  Her boyfriend is a popular player on the high school football team and she has the hunky family gardener lusting after her.  But there’s trouble in paradise.  A local girl who has been missing is discovered dead, her right leg and hand amputated.  When Aubrey goes missing, her frantic parents and the FBI who have swooped in to take over the case, assume the worst.  And well they should.  In some disturbingly gory sequences we see a masked killer using dry ice on Aubrey in a manner that most refrigeration companies would definitely not recommend.  When a girl that is identical to Aubrey is found, barely alive with her right hand amputated and her leg beyond saving, it seems the ordeal is over.  But there’s the slight problem that she claims to not recognize her parents, has never heard of Aubrey and says her name is Dakota Moss.  Dakota is the exact opposite of Aubrey, complete with a story about a crack-addicted mother and a job as an exotic dancer.  From there the plot truly becomes even loopier and I can’t give any more away in good conscience because so much of my enjoyment of the film came in the (admittedly contrived) plot twists.

The identity of the killer is clear fairly early on and the psychological motives for this character are pretty flimsy, with almost no logical cohesion.  But that doesn’t matter, because the real mystery at the heart of the script involves the characters of Aubrey and Dakota.  Are they the same person?  Is Aubrey simply suffering from post-traumatic stress?  Is the explanation supernatural?  Could Dakota possibly be Aubrey’s Doppelganger?  It’s with these questions that writer Jeffrey Hammond and director Chris Sivertson toy with audience expectations.

Harking back to the films of Mario Bava in the 60’s and Dario Argento in the 70’s, Sivertson employs a lush color palette that highlights the differences between the two girls.  Aubrey’s scenes are enveloped in a cool, calming blue.  Her clothing, the rose she receives from her boyfriend, and her bedroom all point to her relaxed, self-assured manner.  In stark contrast, Dakota’s world is bathed in red.  Her outfits, the décor and lighting of the strip club where she dances, and her makeup give off an edgy, dangerous feel that only underscores the split between the two girls.  Combining this color scheme with a constantly moving camera that seems to float among the characters and puts the audience right in the middle of the scenes, the film takes on the look and feel of a particularly bent fairy tale.  The proceedings even manage to maintain an artistic sheen when Sivertson allows some surprisingly exploitative strip tease sequences and a sex-scene to go on long past the point of effectiveness.

While the twists and turns of the plot are outrageous, to say the least, the story never completely jumps the rails.  Much of this credit goes not only to the dream-like atmosphere that Sivertson employs, but also the cast that takes the story and runs with it.  While the always reliable McDonough is criminally underused, his solid turn remains an anchor for the nearly, but not quite, over-the-top performance by Ormond.  As a desperate mother convinced that her daughter has returned to her, mangled both physically and psychologically, she always holds audience sympathy even when screaming like a banshee in hospital hallways.  Lohan is surprisingly good in the two roles.  While her Aubrey is seemingly perfect, she underscores her with an understandable feeling of uncertainty about her future and the choices she is making.  As Dakota, her whiskey and cigarettes voice fits perfectly with the character of a girl who has been forced to grow up far too quickly and is cynical and sexually manipulative beyond her years.  Despite the occasional clunky bit of tough girl dialogue (at one point, she gets some unintended laughs by referring to a FBI psychologist as “the fuzz”), she still manages to become an identifiable character for the audience to follow all the way through to the visceral and satisfying ending.

Despite its trappings as a mainstream thriller, this is really a collision between art-house melodrama, bloody horror, and trashy sexploitation. Even with a proper marketing push and a little luck on its side, this is definitely not a film for the multiplex crowd.  But if you’re looking for something truly different to cleanse the pallet of the summer blockbusters, you could do worse than I Know Who Killed Me.