With its mixture of girl-in-danger drama and grisly horror, I KNOW WHO KILLED ME is equally indebted to Lifetime television movies and torture-driven films such as SAW. The film begins as Aubrey Fleming (Lindsay Lohan), a high school student with serious goals as a writer, describes a fictional character she's made up, a stripper named Dakota Moss. Though Aubrey is kidnapped by a serial killer preying on local girls, she manages to escape the fate of all his other victims and survives. When she is found two weeks later after enduring horrible torture, she claims to be Dakota. The horror that Aubrey endured under the hands of the killer is only the beginning in this thriller, as Aubrey/Dakota questions her own sanity and sense of reality.

As an actress who has made her name by playing good-girl characters in films such as FREAKY FRIDAY and MEAN GIRLS, Lohan makes quite a departure from her previous roles with I KNOW WHO KILLED ME. There's plenty of disturbing fare here: scenes of Lohan pole dancing are contrasted with scenes of the same character as an amputee. This is director Chris Sivertson's first major film after two smaller pictures (ALL CHEERLEADERS DIE and THE LOST), and here he creates a highly stylized work with a number of haunting visuals.