Though it has ample competition, the preposterous new thriller I Know Who Killed Me—which unintentionally suggests The Parent Trap as remade by the Marquis de Sade—may just mark the nadir in Lindsay Lohan's sad, excruciatingly public descent from hot young star to walking punchline. The lead role in this kind of laughable, low-grade schlock is supposed to follow decades of bad choices, flops, and public humiliation, not a few years of tabloid infamy and questionable decisions.
In a dual role that plays queasily on her schizophrenic public persona, Lohan plays a pampered child of privilege who's tortured by a sicko and wakes up in the hospital professing to be a tough-as-nails harlot with a crack-addict mom. Then again, Lohan also unironically refers to the police as "fuzz," so it's possible she thinks she's a street tough from the late '60s as well. She then stumbles deliriously down a lurid, Grand Guignol rabbit hole of endless dream sequences, florid symbolism, identical twins, stigmata, babies switched at birth, and a special, exposition-tastic guest appearance by conspiracy buff Art Bell. The film is so relentlessly convoluted that it wouldn't seem out of place if the final twist revealed that Lohan is actually Jim Carrey in the thematically similar The Number 23, another professional suicide attempt disguised as a challenging double role.
From its title onward, Killed suggests a film that Roger Corman might have rejected in 1968 as too sordid even for his lowbrow tastes, with some lovingly filmed torture thrown in for contemporary resonance. Lohan is clearly trying to establish herself as a serious thespian, but the result skews much closer to the grindhouse than the arthouse: Audiences might want to plan a long, hot shower immediately after this ridiculous wallow in Cinemax-ready depravity. Lohan gets to play virgin and whore, hard-boiled stripper and pampered princess. She strips, she swills liquor, she withstands torture, she wrestles with a robotic prosthetic hand. Not since Ashton Kutcher in The Butterfly Effect has such a lightweight actor cavalierly taken on so many daunting acting challenges, and failed so spectacularly. Having broken free of the Disney machine that molded her, Lohan now seems intent on destroying her career and credibility on her own terms.