Unbelievable movie review & film summary (2019)
The first hour of “Unbelievable” is its most challenging. We meet Marie Adler (Kaitlyn Dever) on the worst day of her life, speaking to the police after being raped early that morning. As she slept, someone broke into Marie’s apartment, tied her up, and raped her for hours. She’s clearly deeply traumatized, and Dever is phenomenal at capturing Marie’s deep pain without ever resorting to melodrama, but that trauma is amplified by the way the responding authorities handle the case. First, they basically make her tell her story over and over and over again to different branches of the investigation. It’s entirely unsurprising then when details start to get blurry, but this leads the officers to question Marie’s story altogether. When it’s revealed that Marie comes from a tragic background of abuse—which is used to suggest former trauma may cause her to make up a story here for attention—and when her foster parents and friends have no idea how to help her, Marie is basically painted as a liar. She is forced into a false confession that she made the whole thing up. We know she didn’t. It’s a stunning hour of television in the way it captures how someone could be emotionally bullied into saying something untrue. If you’ve ever wondered how someone could make a false confession, watch the first hour of “Unbelievable.”
And then everyone in an authority position should be forced to watch the second hour. It opens with another rape investigation, this time of a woman named Amber played by Danielle Macdonald. But the responding officer in this situation is an empathetic woman named Karen Duvall (Merritt Wever). Listen to the way she modulates her voice and tries to make the victim comfortable. It’s clearly designed as a contrast to the opening scenes of the series premiere, in which men pushed for facts and details and ignored the emotional temperature of the situation. Duvall never ignores the trauma and the human being in favor of the evidence. It’s a night-and-day difference in approach that not only details how empathy needs to be a part of any investigation, but how it’s the only way to really solve a crime. If a victim feels traumatized again by the authorities then no one wins.
Duvall’s investigation into Amber’s rape brings in another officer named Grace Rasmussen (Toni Collette), who is a very different personality to Karen. Whereas Karen is openly religious and tender, Grace is more of the “bad cop” archetype, although the writers of “Unbelievable,” including Oscar nominee Susannah Grant (“Erin Brockovich”) are very careful not to overplay the oil-and-water buddy copy trope. These two are very different but they realize they both have the same goal—stop this monster from committing more crimes. The midsection of “Unbelievable” is very rewardingly procedural, revealing how Grace and Karen’s team work a case, including searching security footage for suspicious vehicles and even scouring porn sites for potential photos of the victims.
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