'Unbelievable' review: True story of how a serial rapist escaped packs a powerful punch
In the wee hours of a March morning in 2008, a teenager was attacked by a stranger in her apartment who held her at knifepoint, blindfolded her, tied her and raped her for hours. After getting his way, he photographed her and threatened to post the pictures online if she complained to the cops.
'Unbelievable' chronicles the harrowing incidents of the true story in an eight-part series on Netflix. The show begins as Marie (Kaitlyn Dever) and her former foster mom, Judith (Elizabeth Marvel), wait for the police to arrive after the attack. Within minutes, questions are slammed onto her as officers interrogate her about the events of the night. She softly mumbles the things she can remember but is not able to recall the right sequence.
Right from the beginning, the series highlights the plight of a victim and how they relive the trauma during the complex investigation process. Right from taking pictures to collecting samples and even dropping off her underpants into their custody, Marie has to comply with their orders even as she twitches and shivers from the painful memories.
In episode two, the story shifts focus to Karen Duvall (Merritt Wever) and Grace Rasmussen (Toni Collette), based on real-life detectives Stacy Galbraith and Edna Hendershot. The two detectives attempt to solve eerily similar rape cases and trace a common thread with Marie's case. The rest of the plot follows Marie's struggle to prove her story right.
Based on the Pulitzer Prize-winning ProPublica article 'An Unbelievable Story of Rape', and the 'This American Life' episode 'Anatomy of Doubt', the series is a hard-hitting attempt at highlighting how more faith needs to be put in a victim's story with a thorough investigation. The complicated and convoluted case has many layers but show creators Susannah Grant, Ayelet Waldman and Michael Chabon manage to get the right elements in play to etch out the incident as it happened.
Dever packs a powerful punch as she strikes a balance between building tension and creating intense anguish. Emmy winners Wever and Collette deliver top-notch performances and take the story one notch higher. The script is even and runs at a sharp pace. In all, the series is a sensitive and solid portrayal of a story that needed to be told.
