Please watch Netflix’s “Unbelievable.”
Unbelievable feels like it could be a sister show to Chernobyl, the horrifying masterpiece which dropped earlier this year. On the surface of things they don’t seem terribly alike (no-one dies a horrible lingering death in Unbelievable, more’s the pity when it comes to the rapist at the center of the story) but both are essentially about how miscommunication, ignorance, and plain old human stupidity can lead to tragedy.
And like Chernobyl, Unbelievable is based on a true story. I’m gonna go ahead and reveal now that Unbelievable ends happily, or as happily as it could do under the circumstances. The girl whose testimony kicks off the story, Marie Adler, she’s alive and well right now, settled down with children of her own. I didn’t know that going into this show, and was terribly relieved to find out.
In the show Marie Adler is played by Kaitlyn Denver, an actress who looks like a cross between Shailene Woodley and Ellen Page and is just as talented as they are. She’s amazing. Everything Marie feels, Denver makes sure the audience feels it too. By the third episode of Unbelievable, as the clock ticked closer to 2am for me, my heart was pounding every time she appeared on screen. I was so desperate for her to get the justice she deserved.
Every episode brought a new horror, you see, a dull depressing kind of horror. Marie’s violently raped by a home intruder. She goes to the police. They decide they don’t believe her. They gaslight her – a vulnerable teenager who’s been abused before – into saying she lied. They charge her with filing a false report. They then send her court date to the wrong address. Honest to god, around that point I was about to hurl things at the screen. Even Marie’s lawyer, who considers her just one more case in his heavy workload, seems bewildered at how she’s been treated. This is not quite the same incompetence that led innocent men to be consumed from the inside out with radioactive poison in Russia, but it’s pretty damn close.
While Marie is suffering from a very different and much more invisible poisoning, a pair of detectives start investigating a string of home invasion rapes. These are Grace Rasmussen and Karen Duvall, who are also based on real people, and are played here by Toni Collette and Merrit Weaver. They disappeared into their characters so completely I didn’t even recognise either of them at first.
I literally cannot recommend this show enough. I was a nervous wreck by the time the wheels of justice finally started turning, waiting for more horrible things to happen that thankfully never came. Finally, the male officer who accused Marie of lying learns that he was wrong, in a scene so satisfying it’ll be seared onto my eyeballs forever:
Oh, Collette’s face there. Disappointed, exasperated, sad and disgusted all at once.
I can’t think of an aspect of this show which wasn’t perfectly done. For an exmaple of how much thought was put into it – the actress who plays Marie’s therapist is Brooke Smith, aka the victim in The Silence of the Lambs. Because of that, the therapy scene has an extra tinge to it I don’t think it would have had otherwise. Not least because this show is a big middle finger to movies like the aforementioned: Unbelievable is a show about violence towards women, but very little violence towards women is actually shown.
So far, Unbelievable has 97% on RottenTomatoes – that’s actually a higher score than Chernobyl (very deservedly) got. But I hope this show likewise gets embedded deep in the public consciousness. Its message is so, so important.