Unbelievable: the quiet power of Netflix's fact-based rape drama
In the second episode of the Netflix drama series Unbelievable, detective Karen Duvall, played by Merritt Wever, conducts what I imagine could be a high-budget training video for sexual assault investigators. Duvall finds the victim, a college student named Amber, processing in the stairwell of her apartment building in Golden, Colorado, one morning in 2011. Duvall already knows the outline of the crime – breaking and entering, a rape that lasted for hours – but she starts at the beginning, smoothly guiding Amber through an interview step by step, checking her comfort level with each question. Her voice is disarming and pillowy, couching sentences with “if it’s all right with you”, “if you’re comfortable” and “take your time”. Yet she builds a case, detail by detail. When she visits Amber at the hospital after her physical exam, she requests the nurse on duty to “ask her if she wants me to come in, but make it clear that if she doesn’t, that’s absolutely fine.” Then she immediately calls the station to block off conference room three for her investigation.
In other words: she does good work. The whole episode is a portrait in how things should be – how serious sexual assault cases should be taken, how crucial it is to listen to victims, how memory lapses and scattered details should be considered part and parcel of trauma memory, not a strike against it. It just so happens in this case, what should be is also what was – the episode, written by Susannah Grant, the series co-creator with Michael Chabon and Ayelet Waldman, is based on the true story outlined in An Unbelievable Story of Rape, a 2015 article by T Christian Miller and Ken Armstrong co-published by ProPublica and the Marshall Project. Karen Duvall is inspired by the real detective Stacy Galbraith, also of Golden, who said in the article that her one rule of investigations is to “listen and verify”.
In the show, as in real life, Duvall/Galbraith and the detective Grace Rasmussen (based on the real Edna Hendershot) of neighboring Westminster, Colorado, partner up to pursue what they soon realize is a serial rapist evading justice, in part, by exploiting the police’s lack of communication between departments, especially on cold rape cases. Their process is diligent – late nights, meticulous lists of all cars captured in one recovered security video, data sets on data sets – and crackling, in the way watching two people consistently level each other up can be; inspiring, in their empathy and doggedness; refreshing, in a way more visceral than intellectual – it holds my frustratingly short attention span, without draining it.
This part of the show transcends so-called “competence porn” (as in, the thrill of watching talented, smart people work together to solve problems) in part because it acts as the corrective to its other, far more brutal half. Duvall and Rasmussen aren’t even introduced until the second episode; the first belongs to Marie Adler (Kaitlyn Dever), an 18-year-old on the brink of self-sufficiency after a string of foster homes when she calls 911 in Lynwood, Washington, in August 2008. She reports an hours-long rape by a masked stranger, but the police take the opposite tack than Duvall. They elevate minor inconsistencies in Marie’s story into major discrepancies, play her precarious housing situation as leverage, corner her – both in practice and Lisa Cholodenko’s camera – into vertiginous doubt. She fearfully recants, and is charged with false reporting.
Marie’s report and its aftermath splices Duvall and Rasmussen’s investigation of eerily similar rapes three years later, though neither know it. The stories are two sides of the same coin – on one, the system failing; on the other, the system working – and listening – as it should. It illustrates two truths at the same time: law enforcement fails victims routinely, banally, devastatingly; there are also good actors who do the work. Unbelievable balances the two without veering into the salacious or exploitative – the assaults cast in brief memory flashes rather than scenes – or outrage-inducing. There’s certainly a place for outrage – Roll Red Roll, a documentary about the Steubenville, Ohio, high school gang rape from a year after the events in Unbelievable, and Chanel Miller’s upcoming book Know My Name, on the Brock Turner case, remind us that there are shockingly few consequences for assailants deemed “promising” or when a shard of doubt on the victim’s credibility can paint an assault as “grey area”.
But Unbelievable doesn’t focus on opposition, on uncovering incompetence or bad attitudes in law enforcement or the community. It takes as a given what most of its likely audience already knows: that these obstacles exist, that they must be known and considered, that the conversation moving forward starts from here. Instead, the focus is on getting the job done – in this case, finding and locking up the serial rapist, giving the victims space and recognition to heal, unwittingly correcting the devastating mistake on Marie’s record three years before.
Perhaps Unbelievable works, too, as a corrective on old detective story tropes. I’m usually drawn to the selfsabotaging or self-negating – Amy Adams careening through a vodkasoaked and glaringly unethical journalism venture in Sharp Objects, or the melancholic True Detectives. I enjoy the quick hits of resolution in episodic procedurals such as Law & Order SVU, in which the victims usually have crazy backstories and, at most, a few scenes in an episode or two. But there’s something refreshing about seeing two women do their job free of dramatic embellishment – tackle their case and then go home to their families, to complicated yet stable marriages.
It helps that Unbelievable boasts a next-level cast given several episodes to grow. If Dever didn’t already arrive with her scene-stealing turn in Booksmart, then she’s here now as Marie. Wever can convey more feeling with a head-tilt and a “hmm” than many could do with a whole monologue. And Collette fills Rasmussen’s steely, guy’s gal shell with a visceral sense of responsibility and faith in her work.
Maybe it’s that disciplined responsibility that floored me, that made Unbelievable so watchable, despite its grim subject. The unveiling of #MeToo stories the past few years have pummeled me, taught me to mostly doubt justice, to sometimes value trauma as the most publicly interesting and formative thing about women; given this, to see two female detectives do their work well, grind on the job and struggle with the usual work/life balance confounds expectations. Listen. Verify.
Back at the hospital in Colorado, Duvall reassures: “You don’t need to explain any of your decisions to me,” she says when Amber tries to justify why she hasn’t called anyone – a concern clearly rooted in the knowledge that reporting sexual assault and harassment almost always means reporting on your credibility, too.
Later, Duvall walks Amber to a friend’s apartment, gives her number, says she’ll be in touch. She lingers a moment at the closed door, pondering, soaking it in. Then she gets back to work.
Unbelievable is streaming now on Netflix