Survivors on Screen #2: Unbelievable
What this humane miniseries shows us about recovery after rape
This is the second installment in my series about how sexual violence is portrayed in TV and film. Please be aware that some readers might find it triggering and that there are spoilers ahead. Here are the earlier posts in this series: the introduction, ‘Promising Young Woman’.
Unbelievable is a true crime miniseries that was released on Netflix in September 2019. It stars Kaitlyn Dever as Marie, a young woman who is raped by a man who breaks into her home. She is forced to recant her statement and faces criminal charges for making what the police decide is a “false accusation”. In a neighbouring state, two police officers (Toni Collette and Merritt Wever) are investigating a series of rapes committed by the same perpetrator. The series follows these parallel stories, before converging in the final episode.
The show was based on the 2015 Pulitzer Prize-winning article written by T. Christian Miller and Ken Armstrong (of ProPublica and The Marshall Project, respectively), and a Peabody award-winning episode of This American Life. It was very popular among critics and audiences alike, scoring 98% among critics and 89% among audiences.
I watched the show soon after it was released. At the time, I was working a shitty job. Walking into the office most mornings, I packed my sense of self into a cardboard box so I could get through the day. That job gave me an income, a routine, and the time I needed to rebuild myself after a series of devastating experiences in the non-profit sector. It also, I can see with hindsight, took a huge toll on my mental health.
In that chapter of my life, I was hungry for stories like this one. Stories about sexual violence that didn’t minimise the harm or celebrate the aggressors. Stories that described the devastating impact of these crimes. Stories that didn’t shy away from making the audience uncomfortable.
‘Unbelievable’ hinges on Kaitlyn Dever’s performance as Marie, which is the middle name of the real woman at the centre of this story1. When we meet her, she’s living in an independent living community designed to help young adults who’ve been in foster care transition into more stable housing. In eight extremely binge-able episodes, we watch as a cascade of injustices derails her life. She loses her job and her home. She’s publicly shamed and disbelieved by the people closest to her. She considers ending her life and struggles to find a way to move on.
It’s an astounding performance. Dever is both childish and worldly, flitting from astonishing self-possession to teenage silliness. As one critic wrote, “Dever’s tears will almost certainly move you, but it’s the moments in which she swallows down an entire storm, just to put on an impassive face and get out the door, that will linger longest”.
Visual identity
Like ‘Promising Young Woman’, ‘Unbelievable’ doesn’t use women’s bodies to gratuitously depict the horrors of sexual violence. Director Lisa Cholodenko has spoken about her desire to shoot the rape scenes with sensitivity and thoughtfulness.
My biggest challenge was, ‘How do I get underneath the skin of this woman and her trauma?’ We know how to [shoot rape scenes] in an objectifying way, which for me, doesn’t really work. It typically feels melodramatic or contrived or from the filmmaker’s point of view,” Cholodenko says. “So my biggest challenge was getting into her psyche as much as possible — without it being a freaky art film, you know? I wanted to keep it grounded in the story and in realism. I wanted the camera to have a point of view that wasn’t fussy or fancy, that was in sync with Marie’s.
We see the assault from Marie’s perspective in a series of horrific glimpses from beneath her blindfold. Terrifying micro-close-ups are intercut with her staring at a photo of herself on a beach. It’s a disorientating, unsettling sequence. Those scenes are soon followed by shots of Marie undergoing a medical examination after the assault. We watch her wince as a doctor jams a speculum into her vagina with no warning. We see the exposure in her eyes as her naked body is photographed for evidence.
We later learn that the evidence collected through this exam was never analysed. If it had been, the DNA could have helped the police catch the rapist years before. Like thousands of other survivors, the trauma of undergoing an invasive medical exam shortly after being raped was almost entirely pointless for Marie.
The police incompetence doesn’t end there. Marie is questioned several times, both at the scene of the crime and in the police station. The first man to question her is matter of fact when he asks if “the penetration with his penis or his fingers?”. He doesn’t notice her recoil before she quietly replies “not his fingers”.
The police investigation is handicapped by an intervention from one of Marie’s former foster mothers. Peggy, played beautifully by Elizabeth Marvel, confides in the investigating officer that she has suspicions about Marie’s story. She describes how Marie has been displaying what she calls “look at me” behaviour and wonders whether she might have lied about the assault to get attention.
It was so strange because I sat down next to her, and she was telling me what happened, and I got this — I’m a big Law & Order fan, and I just got this really weird feeling. It was like, I felt like she was telling me the script of a Law & Order story. She seemed so detached and removed emotionally.”
Appearing emotionally detached is a very common response to severe trauma. Most people are familiar with the ‘fight or flight’ response. In moments of extreme crisis, it’s also common for victims to freeze or fawn. But Peggy, herself a survivor of sexual trauma, doesn’t know this and shares her doubts with the investigating officer. This really triggered my rage at middle-class, white, do-gooder, interfering Mom types.
It’s also noteworthy that Peggy tried to understand Marie’s experience by comparing it to what she’d seen on TV. As I wrote in the introduction to this series, how sexual violence is portrayed in popular culture has real consequences for survivors. If their behaviour doesn’t match what audiences have seen on TV, it can cause people to doubt whether or not they are telling the truth.
The police, led by investigating Detective Parker (Eric Lange), interrogate Marie again. Throughout these scenes, “we hear the sound of static, see flashbacks to her violent assault, and see moments of escape as she pictures herself on a sandy beach. It’s a disorienting way of illustrating the effects of PTSD and dissociation that many victims experience.” We watch as Marie withdraws further into herself, recoiling from the demand that she relives the rape again and again. Eventually, exhausted and terrified, she recants her story. The police disregard overwhelming physical evidence, including the wounds on her body, and decide she’s a liar. She’s charged with false reporting soon afterward. The impact on Marie’s life is colossal. “It broke me. I lost everything,” the real-life Marie said later.
‘Unbelievable’ shows us two sides of the same coin: how the system can fail, and how it can succeed. When another young woman (played with heartbreaking vulnerability by Danielle Macdonald) is raped in a neighbouring state, Detective Duvall (Merritt Weaver) delivers a masterclass in respectful, focused detective work which is rooted in consent and empathy. She teams up with Detective Rasmussen (Toni Collette) and together, they investigate a serial rapist.
‘Unbelievable’ dwells in the pleasure of watching women work. There’s nothing showy or dramatic about it, just the diligent process of reviewing CCTV footage, chasing down leads, and digging through spreadsheets. They are dogged, thorough, and deeply empathetic. The pace is steady, methodical, and like all good procedurals, psychically satisfying. Their characters aren’t two-dimensional career women or stereotypical “good cops”. Weaver & Colette inhabit grounded authentic professionals with vulnerabilities, flaws, and rich, complicated lives outside of their work. It’s not their gender that makes them better at their jobs, but their commitment to treating victims with empathy.
There are so many troubling things that emerge from our culture’s fascination with true crime. ‘Unbelievable’ is an excellent example of what you can do with the form and how you can show a better, kinder way of engaging with victims and investigating the crimes they report. I can’t think of another crime show which treats victims of sexual crime with as much compassion as ‘Unbelievable’.
The aftermath of rape
Perhaps the aspect of ‘Unbelievable’ that I enjoyed the most was its willingness to dwell on the detail of what happened after Marie’s rape.
Across eight episodes, we see her try to recover. We watch her have a meltdown about bedsheets in the department store. We watch as she tries to persuade someone to buy her beer outside a convenience store. We watch her work. We watch as she sits in a circle of her peers who are upset with her for “lying” to the police about her rape. We watch as she has a panic attack during her driving test, a version of which I experienced in my own life. We watch her discover a story about herself on the internet. We watch her panic as she realises she missed a court date for the false-reporting charge because the details were sent to the wrong address. We watch her stand terrified before the judge as she faces those charges. These are the kinds of scenes and details that would have been cut from another show. Things that might be seen as distractions, filler that slows down the pace of the show. In ‘Unbelievable’, Marie’s normal life isn’t a distraction from the police investigation happening in another state, but an illustration of why that work matters.
Throughout the show, we see victims of different ages, races, and backgrounds. Some seem to cope well immediately after the assault, but later sink into a deep depression. Some become paranoid and anxious. Others retreat into themselves completely, abandoning the lives they’ve built. No show can provide a complete picture of the countless ways sexual violence harms survivors, but ‘Unbelievable’ makes a valiant attempt.
The ending
In the end, the rapist is caught and imprisoned for 327 and a half years. He is unlikely to ever be free. But for me, the true emotional climax of the show is when Marie calls Detective Duvall. “It was hearing about you guys that changed things completely. I wake up now and I can imagine good things happening,” Marie says. That was the scene that broke me. I sobbed as I watched. Two detectives cared enough to listen and do their jobs, and it was enough to change Marie’s life. Sadly, Marie’s story is not uncommon. At least two other victims were wrongly charged with false reporting before their rapists were found and convicted.
‘Unbelievable’ doesn’t demonise the cops who disbelieved her. Detective Parker is portrayed as a regular guy who thought he was doing the right thing. Stunned and slack-jawed, he travels to meet the female detectives who caught and imprisoned the rapist he didn’t believe existed. He compliments their work. In a moving scene, he visits Marie at her workplace to apologise. As he reckons with the harm he caused to a vulnerable teenage girl, his apology is genuine as is Marie’s anger in response. “Next time, do better,” she says.
Rather than demonising an individual, the show highlights how easy it is to make catastrophic mistakes if you don’t have the right training. Director Lisa Cholodenko described it as “a human story about people’s fallibility and projections and missed perceptions”. The real-life detective on this case later said: “It wasn’t her job to try to convince me. It was my job to get to the bottom of it — and I didn’t.” He wasn’t disciplined for his actions, but detectives in his state now receive additional training on sexual violence.
‘Unbelievable’ is not a perfect show. I didn’t love the therapy scenes, which in my view, are hard to execute well. “No matter how much someone says they care about you, they don’t,” Marie says from the therapy couch, opposite Brooke Smith as the therapist. Perhaps it’s because I’ve lived through so much therapy that it’s rare for me to find an on-screen depiction that feels real. Others have critiqued the dialogue for veering too much into didacticism. I didn’t experience it that way, though I think it’s a valid point. In all cases, the depth, subtlety, and skill of the cast elevates what’s on the page.
Rapist
I usually focus my attention on survivors and the society we live in. But researching this show, I was struck by the role film played in his actions. The real-life assailant cited Star Wars as the first time he saw someone abuse a woman.
“Deviant fantasies had gripped him since he was a kid, way back to when he had seen Jabba the Hutt enslave and chain Princess Leia. Where do you go when you’re five and already thinking about handcuffs? he would ask himself.”
He thought of what he did as “rape theatre”. He “hunted” his victims, spent hours watching them, breaking into their homes, and making sure there were no weapons within their reach. He recalled the feeling of having raped one elderly woman as being “like he’d just eaten Thanksgiving dinner”. He thought about his need to assault women as a “beast” that needed to be fed. Film was the first place he saw a woman being abused. He went on to rape at least a half dozen women.
Survival
“He didn’t take my life away,” the real-life Marie said of her rapist. “I don’t want to cower in the corner. I didn’t want it to ruin the rest of my life. I didn’t want to give him the satisfaction. I wasn’t going to let him destroy me.”
She later forgave her foster mother, the woman who planted a seed of doubt in the minds of detectives. It’s a generosity I’m not sure I could muster, but she found a way to forgive some of the people who let her down.
I read once that when you’re grappling with a problem in your creative work, you should watch a procedural. The advice was that by watching someone else solve a problem, you’d find a way to solve yours too. I’ve watched this show, in its entirety, a handful of times. It was constructed to binge and I let it flow until Netflix asks, a few hours later, if I’m still there. I watched it once, while deeply triggered, finding comfort in the idea that some people do care about survivors. It is, perhaps, a strange thing to say but shows like this have brought me tremendous comfort. When you’re struggling to survive, you need to know that it’s possible. ‘Unbelieveable’ helped me see that it is.
Bibliography:
The article that series is based on. (& the book the authors went on to write)
The episode of This American Life.
Netflix Series Based on Our Work Explores Costs of Not Believing Rape Victims - ProPublica
This short video shares more about the true story behind the series.
This Twitter thread, which includes the real-life Marie’s views on the series
‘Unbelievable’ Is Hard to Watch But Easy to Believe - The Cut
Netflix’s ‘Unbelievable’ Is a Different Sort of Drama About Sexual Assault - The Atlantic
Netflix’s Difficult, Exemplary ‘Unbelievable’ Devastates Without Needing to Shock - Paste Magazine
Netflix's Rape Docudrama 'Unbelievable' Is the Anti-'Law & Order: SVU' - Time
‘Unbelievable’ keeps its rape investigation real, including treatment of the victims - LA Times
Thanks for reading! If you’d like to get the next installment in your inbox, please subscribe using the link below. If you enjoyed it, please share it with a friend.
The real-life Marie is also credited as an Executive Producer on the show.
Very thought provoking. Looking forward to the next one!