Netflix’s Unbelievable agitates in all the right ways

Netflix’s new, no-nonsense female detective crime show, Unbelievable, gets viewers agitated, and that’s a good thing.

Teenager Marie was raped, questioned, questioned again, swabbed, photographed, questioned, questioned again, interrogated, interrogated again, threatened with arrest, then dismissed. Right off the bat, the first episode of Netflix’s Unbelievable gets viewers agitated for all the right reasons. While there’s certainly reason to get excited about a crime show starring two, no-nonsense female detectives, Unbelievable is also a show that aims to make watchers angry.

What’s so unique about Unbelievable versus other crime shows that focus around rape crimes is that it doesn’t rely on the rape alone to get viewers’ attention and make them anxious. Unbelievable, created by Susannah Grant, Michael Chabon, and Ayelet Waldman, focuses on what happens after the rape–the endless questions from police, detective and nurses whose initial goal in the show seems to be checking the validity of a victim’s story, rather than catching a serial rapist.

Marie, played by Kaitlyn Dever, is newly out of foster care and living on her own in an apartment community that caters to at-risk youth. Late one night, an unknown man in a mask sneaks into her bedroom and rapes her, all the while a traumatized Marie has flashbacks to her time at the beach, running into the ocean and diving into the waves, while in the present the teenager is drowning in terror.

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After being questioned more than six times about details of the attack by police officials, hospital staff and crime detectives, everyone–including Marie’s two most trusted foster mothers–conclude that Marie must have made up the incident due to arguably small disparities in her story.

It’s infuriating to watch a disoriented rape victim be told she imagined the whole nightmare due to her “troubling” past. But, then again, that’s the point of Unbelievable.

If Dever’s sincere tears and brilliantly believable portrayal of Marie’s horrific and isolating experience as an “unbelievable”  and distrusted rape victim wasn’t enough to break the hearts of viewers, Unbelievable is actually based on a true story from 2009 about an 18-year-old girl in Denver who was raped at knifepoint, and not a single person believed her story.

Eventually, the girl was convinced by investigators that she made the story up, until two detectives, Stacy Galbraith and Edna Hendershot, deep dived into her and other women’s stories.

In the show, Galbraith and Hendershot are portrayed as detectives Karen Duvall (Merritt Wever) and Grace Rasmussen (Toni Collette). The detail that’s put into every scene in Unbelievable, from stakeouts to investigating victims’ bedrooms and piecing together evidence, is nothing less than impressive. Each shot is so precise, that any blinking while watching the show would be a huge mistake.

On top of that, Collette and Wever’s performances are spot-on, the minds of these driven, sympathetic detectives laid out vulnerably in the open and it’s a fascinating look at what goes on behind the scenes of serial crime cases like Marie’s when detective’s hearts bleed for their cases.

Though the show does have a bit of a Broadchurch  season 2 sort of feel, Unbelievable draws its energy more from the psychology of rape victims rather than the anticipation of catching the criminal–though there’s naturally a bit of that too. The storytelling is as fresh as it is raw. But there’s also some frightfully familiar themes.

While Marie is being interrogated about her story by two male detectives, it had a hauntingly similar feel to that of the 2002 film, The Interrogation of Michael Crowe, a movie also based on a true story of a young boy in California who was convinced by unrelenting detectives that he killed his own sister.

As Marie is overpowered by the detective’s persuasion, one can’t help but remember a sobbing Michael, timidly and tearfully giving in to the proposed theory that he was the one who stabbed his sister.

Unbelievable is a show that aims to cause pain in the right places and make viewers rage for all the right reasons. While the true story behind the inspiration for Unbelievable, published in ProPublica and The Marshall Project and written by Ken Armstrong and T. Christian Miller, won a Pulitzer Prize for its investigative journalism, it would be no surprise if Grant’s, Chabon’s and Waldman’s show earns some awards of its own.

Unbelievable is now available to stream on Netflix and the full, true story behind the show can be read in the book, A False Report: A True Story of Rape in America.

What do you think of Netflix’s Unbelievable so far? What other feminist crime shows are worth a binge? Leave your thoughts in the comments below!