How Unbelievable got it right

The trauma of rape in the Netflix series shows disturbing ways the system works around rape survivors and addresses it as it should be. 

Trauma is often exploited in the media, which, in layers, has enabled rape culture by using women characters as the subject of rape-revenge plots even in big-budget movies and TV series like Game of Thrones or as a backstory to build a strong woman character in iconic movies like Quentin Tarantino’s Kill Bill.

However, these defaults and stereotypes in rape narratives associated with shame and a flashback of “badly behaved women” characters are dismantled in the series Unbelievable created by Susannah Grant. 

The series revolves around investigations of rapes that follow a similar pattern. The story starts with Marie Adlter (Kaitlyn Dever), one of the rape survivors. Marie has been in foster care since age three and finally when she starts to live independently a stranger breaks into her home one night and rapes her. There is no evidence of a break-in or traces on her body that the police expect in a survivor. Instead of shifting the focus to the vicious plan of the rapist, the investigation hangs onto Marie, who doesn’t fit into the police’s image of a rape survivor.

There are repeated instances where Marie is not believed (hence the title of the series).  When Marie reveals that she has been in a million foster homes and tries to get help from people she knows — her friends, her boyfriend, and all possible former foster parents — she is dismissed. 

Instead, Marie is accused of making it up for attention. The cruel part of the story is the number of times the interrogations take place, Marie has to explain again and again what happened to her. The series depicts every recollection of the rape — the disturbing excerpts from her memory — as it is. It feels like a deliberate move to discomfit the audience to show what lived experiences can do to someone’s state of mind and functioning. 

Later in the series, when the investigation of similar cases of rape takes place in a distant and different part of the state, the series shifts its focus to other survivors, investigated by two detectives from the area’s police force. It presents a different scenario — how the detectives treat the survivors and the police procedures that made Marie suffer, which weren’t applied here. Survivors here are treated with concern and knowledge of post-traumatic stress and assurance of legal aid. Here they aren’t made to recollect the story in ways they didn’t want to. 

In one of the scenes, detective Grace Rasumussen (Toni Collette), asks a senior officer, “Where is your rage?” referring to the the passive attitude of people in the police department towards assault cases. It feels like a question the film asks: Why is there no rage for the kind of violation and exploitation rape and enabling it does? 

Unbelievable doesn’t do anything extraordinary. Perhaps that is why the series is so important — it shows what the ordinary and normal should be to deal with people in pain. Not many films and TV shows allow space for survivors to be what they are, before and after a tragedy. There is a cyclical sorrow expected from survivors, and if that doesn’t come the fact that anything tragic ever happened to them is not acknowledged. 

Another crucial thing is the language. When Marie says, “He raped me,” the officer replies, “You need to be more specific.” In another scene when Marie says, “I am pretty positive that it happened,” the police ask, “Pretty positive or positive?”. The subtle and direct stigma associated with trusting a rape survivor is detailed in different scenes in the series.

 When Marie wanted to get a bedsheet like the one she had before, her foster mom says, “I wouldn’t get a similar one, especially after something like that.” Incidents like these get intense and disturbing as they progress to a level where Marie succumbs to the pressure of not wanting to go further with systemic torture. Her priority becomes coming out of the bureaucratic trap that doesn’t understand her, and justice that doesn’t make sense until, towards the end, a different investigation elsewhere finds similarities with Marie’s case. The shift to prioritising finding the rapist — which should have been the centre of the investigation in the first place — is brilliant. 

 Towards the end, the series also shows the guilt of the officers who investigated Marie’s case. There is a sense of tension in the police department as the truth came out from another part of the state, in a different investigation territory.  The series calls out a system that gets away by enabling loopholes for perpetrators of crime to escape thanks to the time the legal procedures focus on dissecting the survivors.