Netflix’s ‘Unbelievable’ is a Breathtaking Crime Drama That Puts the Victim First

Unbelievable opens on a harrowing police investigation. Teenager Marie Adler (Kaitlyn Dever) is sitting in a clump on her apartment floor, a blanket covering her like a tent. She tells a police officer and her former foster mother that in the middle of the night an intruder woke her up and sexually assaulted her. Through flashbacks, we can see what little Marie could see through her blindfold, and through the stellar work of actress Kaitlyn Dever, we see how badly this attack has traumatized her. The officer interviewing her asks her about the incident coldly, and without care.

What we watch unfold over the first episode of Unbelievable is a victim victimized twice over. After subjecting herself to multiple interviews and an antiseptic physical exam, her story is questioned, her character impugned, and she is coerced by two older male detectives into lying about making the story up. If you have any sense of moral outrage, you will find it hard not to scream at the screen while watching Unbelievable. What’s worse, by doing her best to do everything right as a victim — immediately calling the police, reporting the crime, opening herself up to social workers — Marie’s story illustrates how wrongly we can treat victims of sexual assault. Her unique reaction to her own trauma is twisted like a knife against her, and her background as a foster child, flitting in and out of families, and acting out for attention, leaves her especially vulnerable.

Unbelievable is an exquisite dramatic retelling of a Pulitzer Prize-winning piece of investigative journalism. Everything in the show from Marie’s awful experiences to the dogged police work of Grace Rasmussen and Karen Duvall is based on a true story. The names have been changed, but this all really, truly happened. As such, there is a stark sense of clear-eyed truth-telling in Unbelievable. It’s in the way the light floods up every frame, or the choice to cast actresses like Bridget Everett and Danielle Macdonald, or to style Merritt Wever’s Karen Duvall like a middle class working woman who just rolled out of bed. Nothing about Unbelievable feels overly stylized or presented with a Hollywood auteur’s flair. There’s no glamour here, but there is dogged detective work and a earnest concern for the victims. Because of all this, Unbelievable feels like a true story, and not simply a lurid true crime story.

Unbelievable starts with a victim, but in Episode 2, we jump ahead a few years in time to Colorado, where detective Karen Duvall (Merritt Wever) is handling an extremely similar case to Marie’s, only this time with the utmost respect. Even as we follow Karen for a whole day, from pulling up to a crime scene to going over the case with her Midwest hunk of a husband, we also cut back to Marie’s story. Seeing how the fallout of her experience continues to traumatize her is heartbreaking, but a surprisingly effective way to communicate just how corrosive sexual assault can be. One experience can shadow a woman for her entire life. Unbelievable understands this, and Unbelievable wants to correct this.

By the time Episode 3 starts, Unbelievable has shifted to become a fresh, feminist take on the detective drama. Detectives Grace Rasmussen (Toni Collette) and Karen Duvall have different approaches — and they bristle against each other at first — but they are both pursuing the same serial rapist in Colorado. In many ways, their scenes feel like a retort to decades of crime dramas focusing on hard-boiled male detectives, and the way Unbelievable is designed feels like a rejoinder to fare like Mindhunter or True Detective. By focusing so hard on Marie’s story first, the show never loses sight of the victims. It is the criminal who is the phantom, a shadow of a man who refuses to leave a physical trace of himself. Other crime shows obsess over the cat-and-mouse aspect of detective work, romanticizing the bond between a would-be hero and their supposed match, a criminal mastermind. Unbelievable instead forces the audience to feel for the victims. It is their faces we see, their voices we hear tremble, and their stories we want avenged.

Unbelievable is a knockout crime drama that pushes the genre ahead with tenderness. There is a commitment to truth here that doubles as a commitment to justice. Dever, Wever, and Collette are all sensational in their roles — each letting their characters appear stripped down, vulnerable, and haunted by the crimes in unique ways. By all rights, Unbelievable should become viewers’ next big crime drama obsession, but then again, Unbelievable understands that nothing in this world is quite fair.

Unbelievable premieres on Netflix on September 13, 2019.

Watch Unbelievable on Netflix