Reviewed by Rama Gaind.
Directors: Lisa Cholodenko, Michael Dinner, Susannah Grant, Netflix.
Cast: Toni Collette, Merritt Wever, Kaitlyn Dever, Blake Ellis, Dale Dickey.
Toni Collette, Merritt Wever and Kaitlyn Dever star in Unbelievable.
The title says it all. The first few disturbing minutes of Unbelievable should be enough to hold your interest – and the knowledge that what happens next is based on a true story. That only makes it all the more attention grabbing. The drama television series is about a teenager who was charged with lying about having been raped, and the two female detectives who followed the path to the truth.
That’s how we get transported back to 2008 and a Seattle suburb where troubled teenager Marie Adler (Dever) is raped in her own apartment by a masked attacker who has every detail planned out. The depiction of the attack itself is indistinct, but shocking, and Dever appeals in the intentionally routine outcome. In her statements to police detectives and hospital staff, Marie has to relive the attack over and over again.
Then there is the battery of medical tests. Unbelievably, Marie is intimidated into recanting her story. The detectives promptly seize on discrepancies between statements and their own interviews with other people to bully Marie into recanting her story. She’s then charged with making a false report.
Moving forward, years later, the scene shifts to Colorado. Detective Karen Duvall (Wever, Godless) has interviewed a young woman (Danielle Macdonald, The Thief), who has just survived a similar attack. Duvall’s inquiries lead her across town to meet a Detective Grace Rasmussen (Collette, The Sixth Sense, Little Miss Sunshine), who is investigating yet another similar case, and the hunt is on.
The characters of Wever and Collette make a contrasting pair; Duvall emanating a compassionate determination and Rasmussen a more immediately forceful, long-striding personality.
However, co-director Grant underlines the fact that the real contrast is not between the two women, but between their shared empathy and outrage on behalf of the victims, and the want of the same among too many of their male colleagues.
Both Dever and Macdonald continue to grow in stature, delivering different, but perfectly judged performances in demanding roles. It’s an uncommon treat to see such a strong, multi-generational cast of women holding together a work that illuminates a vitally important issue on which men have ‘too often dropped the ball’.
