I Know Who Killed Me ending revisited: The twins and their mental link

I Know Who Killed Me was released in 2007, landing with an extremely negative reception. Only a few of them were positive, as its 9% score shows on the review aggregator website Rotten Tomatoes. Fascinatingly, one of the positive ones came from The Washington Post, which reads:

"A credible piece of pop entertainment of the hottie-in-distress genre."

It stars Lindsay Lohan in the dual roles of Aubrey Fleming and Dakota Moss, acting opposite Neal McDonough, Brian Geraghty, Julia Ormond, and more. Sadly, performances in the film aren't the best thing in the story. However, the film has somehow garnered a cult following if we revisit it today.

I Know Who Killed Me is about a girl who is believed to have been abducted by a killer and survived. Initially appearing as a film about a murderer, it turned out to be about a stigmata-like mental link between two sisters. They both share some kind of telekinetic connection. On top of that, the girl finds her sister buried alive in the ground.

We see Aubrey at the end of I Know Who Killed Me

A still from I Know Who Killed Me. (Image via TriStar Pictures)

Though it was Lindsay Lohan on double duty as Aubrey and Dakota in the film, we see the former in the very beginning and at the very end of I Know Who Killed Me. In the beginning, Aubrey goes missing, and an identical girl is found with amputated limbs.

Initially, authorities believe that she is Aubrey herself, but the trauma she might have gotten from her abductor has caused her to develop a delusional persona. This belief is strengthened after a DNA test, which matches with Aubrey. But the girl insists that she isn't Aubrey but Dakota, a stripper. When we see Aubrey, she is an aspiring writer (a terrible one) and a pianist. She is trying to focus on the former.

A series of events in I Know Who Killed Me then reveals that Dakota is, in fact, an identical twin of Aubrey. Aubrey's parents, Susan (Julia Ormond) and Daniel (Neal McDonough), aren't biological ones, as their only child died during the birth. Later, they both adopted a girl from a crack addict, who was raising the twins.

That explains why Dakota has to live a life as a stripper, and Aubrey was able to get a decent life where she gets to choose a career for herself. Following this reveal, Dakota has some unsettling visions of someone trying to butcher a human somewhere.

These visions are actually part of the telekinetic connection that the sisters share. Dakota is led by one of these visions to a cemetery in I Know Who Killed Me and finds a clue that confirms Aubrey's piano teacher, Douglas Norquist (Thomas Tofel), was the abductor. She goes with Daniel to find him, where Daniel is overpowered and almost killed by Douglas. However, she can defeat the killer and find her sister, who is found buried alive in a forest. She saves her and lies with her there, end of story.