Truly

Unbelievable a limited Netflix series by Lisa Cholodenko, Michael Dinner, Susannah Grant.  With Kaitlyn Dever, Toni Collette, Merritt Wever.  *****

Unbelievable is a series about a serial rapist, a fact which would normally have taken it off my list.  I’m interested in crime dramas, like most people, but rape is too hard to take.  But Unbelievable is so focused on women, so beautifully acted, and so interesting in its character development that I made an exception.  I haven’t written before about various television series that my wife and I have watched, though they have increasingly become more and more of what we see.[1]  But Unbelievable seems worth a few words.

The strongest performance by far was by Kathryn Dever portraying Marie Adler, the first victim (her name has been changed for the film and her true identity kept secret).  I had seen Dever only in Booksmart, where she played such a smart and pretty and glamorous young woman, so witty, that I was startled at how different she seemed here.  Marie is one of those girls who has fallen through the cracks.  Raised in a series of foster homes, including some wonderful foster parents and some not so good, she is now the kind of pallid young woman who rides her bike to work at Walmart or Office Depot, lives in group homes with other such people, and struggles to get by.  All she needs is a break or two but she can’t seem to get one.  Life has dealt her a losing hand.

The man who comes into her apartment and rapes her does not use forced entry, so she may have left her door unlocked.  He wears a mask and carries a knife, saying he will kill her if she makes any noise.  He seems to know things about her, indicating he may have stalked her for some time.  He ties her up and rapes her repeatedly, using condoms, which he takes with him.  Before he leaves he makes her bathe, so he will leave no DNA behind.  This isn’t a rape by a crazy angry person, acting on a whim.  It’s a cold calculated act that the rapist had planned for some time.

We have to admit that the situation sounds, quite literally, unbelievable.  There is no evidence that a crime was committed.  All we’ve got is Marie’s word, but she is mousey and beaten down, regarded as unreliable by her most recent foster mother.  She is also, in contrast to every subsequent victim, interrogated by male detectives, who seem well meaning but are fundamentally insensitive, perhaps just because they’re men.  Eventually they decide they don’t believe her, and pressure her to say she made the story up.  She’s so traumatized by the situation that she eventually does that.  Her friends in her group home/apartment complex abandon her and she becomes a pariah.  After all she’s been through, one wonders how she survives.  She barely does.

As a lawyer says later, rape is the only crime where people don’t believe the victim.  If you say you were robbed or assaulted, the police believe you.  They only have doubts if you say you were raped.

Marie remains central to every episode, but the series moves on to other venues and other rapes.  A female detective named Karen Duvall (Merritt Wever) is investigating one in her jurisdiction, and Detective Grass Rasmussen (Toni Collette) in another.  We immediately see how differently a woman treats a rape victim than a man does.  The difference is startling and instructive.  In other ways, though, these two detectives are not alike.  Duvall is married to another cop, has children, and is a dogged researcher, doing whatever is necessary to solve a case (including being hard on her underlings).  Rasmussen is just as dedicated but is cold and sarcastic, not all that thrilled when Duvall happens along and wants to compare cases.  Part of the rapist’s canniness is that he never commits two crimes in the same jurisdiction, so police departments are not aware of the serial crimes.

There was much in this production that surprised me and raised my admiration.  The rape victims were nothing like each other, and varied in every way; Marie was a teenager and another victim was over 70.  They weren’t all outwardly attractive: the rapes were obviously not about lust so much as power, having control over another human being.  The only thing the women had in common was that they lived alone.  The emotional feeling of the eight episodes is of women rising up and working together to end these crimes against women.  In that way the movie has a #MeToo feel to it, though it is about brutal crimes, not acts of harassment.  We don’t see any of the rapes in detail, just snippets in the memories of the women; we see just enough to be utterly sickened.  And when we actually discover the rapist we find that his whole life is devoted to these crimes.  He’s divorced from the real world, utterly obsessed.

The series is based on a piece of investigative journalism.  Apparently in real life it was the journalists who put the story together as much as the female detectives.  So Unbelievable is an odd hybrid, based on a true series of cases but re-created to make it more effective as a work of art.  But it’s a fascinating piece that is strongly pro-women and somehow heartening.  You feel glad that such female detectives exist.

And I can’t say enough about the acting, especially Kathryn Dever, who seems so young it’s hard to believe she’s so talented.  This is a police procedural that becomes a beautifully made work of art.

[1] We’re both big readers, so we don’t watch television much; our habit for years has been to watch a movie at home on Friday night and see one on the theaters on Saturday.  But the movie offerings lately have been lame, while some things we watch on Friday night have been spectacular.