The trauma of sexual assault is often twofold. There’s the assault itself, and then the systematic way in which victims are dismissed and disbelieved by the criminal justice system. This autumn, over eight precisely constructed episodes, Netflix’s Unbelievable dramatised this process more powerfully than ever before. And, in doing so, it showed that the often problematic true-crime genre could be quietly devastating.
Kaitlyn Dever starred as 18-year-old Marie Adler, a real person whose story was first reported in a Pulitzer prize-winning article by ProPublica and The Marshall Project. The series begins in 2008, in Washington state, when Adler reports her rape, first to her foster mother, then to the local police. The two male detectives leading the investigation soon conclude that Adler’s account is fabricated and – in one of the most shocking details of this story – she is charged with lying to the police. From here, the series splits into two timelines, one continuing to detail how the botched investigation impacted on Adler’s life and the second jumping forward a few years to the work of two female detectives in Colorado. Karen Duvall (Merritt Wever) and Grace Rasmussen (Toni Collette) are about to team up on a separate – at first, anyway – investigation into a serial rapist. Their cases are strikingly similar to Adler’s but their investigation style couldn’t be more different to the Washington police.
You hear a lot of praise for lacerating lines on TV – and rightly so. Yet dialogue that’s superlatively kind, not cruel, rarely gets the same appreciation. Unbelievable had a compassionate force at its centre, in Wever, whose soul-soothing delivery carried an equal and opposite force to Kieran Culkin’s juvenile jousting in HBO’s Succession. And she wasn’t the only master at work in Unbelievable. Collette and Wever were the buddy-cop duo that the #MeToo generation deserved, while Dale Dickey, Elizabeth Marvel and Bridget Everett were all unshowy yet excellent in supporting roles. Diverse casting also subtly upended one persistent rape myth: the victims here didn’t look the same, dress the same or have the same background. As such, any suggestion that a woman could, in some way, be “asking for it” was bogus.
It was one performance in particular, though – that of Dever as Marie – that immediately engaged our empathy, propelling us along to episode eight as fast as we could watch. Adler was so vulnerable, so wronged, so repeatedly and frustratingly misunderstood that you wanted to reach into the television set and hug her. To see her eventually come to some form of peace – and to know that the real Marie found that, too – is the deepest sort of narrative satisfaction.
Even so, it was a bold move to open a genre series with the focus on the victim’s experience, rather than diving straight into the familiar suspense of a police investigation. Instead we sat with Marie as she was coldly instructed to recount her story over and over and over, then subjected to a perfunctory medical examination and dragged through the court system on the wrong side of the dock, while the assault itself was shown only in PTSD-like flashes.
That risk paid off by allowing the series to evoke the victims’ ordeal without resorting to the usual gratuitous “rape porn” tropes. It’s why Unbelievable wasn’t just another trashy true-crime hit, nor another well polished police procedural. Unbelievable solves the moral problem that any fan of an often voyeuristic genre must confront, instead taking a different approach: one that’s both humane and hopeful.
