Susannah Grant’s eight-part series about a real rape case that nobody believed is careful, plain and quietly furious. Kaitlyn Dever is remarkable as the girl the police stop listening to; the detectives’ half is a fine procedural and, now and then, only that.
Unbelievable opens on a young woman on a sofa with a blanket round her, waiting to tell a stranger what has happened, and then makes her tell it again, and again. Marie Adler (Kaitlyn Dever) is eighteen, not long out of foster care, living in a supported housing block in Lynnwood, Washington, in 2008. A man in a mask has broken in during the night, tied her with her own shoelaces, raped her and photographed her. She tells a patrol officer, then a detective, then a nurse, then the detective again. Susannah Grant’s eight-part series, drawn from a real case, spends most of its first hour on that repetition, and that hour is the best thing in it. We recommend it, with one caveat: the second half is a fine police drama, and the first episode is something rarer.
Grant directs alongside Lisa Cholodenko and Michael Dinner, and three cinematographers, Quyen Tran, Xavier Grobet and John Lindley, share the eight episodes. The Lynnwood material is kept grey and flat: overcast car parks, strip-lit corridors, a hospital before the day has started. The assault is never played as a scene. It arrives in fragments a second long, a blade, a shoelace, a camera flash, and editors Jeffrey M. Werner and Keith Henderson drop them into the interviews without warning, so we get the attack the way Marie gets it, as an intrusion. The forensic examination is swabs, photographs and a ruler held against a bruise, and nothing is lit for effect. Will Bates’s score, mostly a low held tone, stays under the picture.
Then the doubt starts. Judith (Elizabeth Marvel), one of Marie’s former foster mothers, sees her laughing on the phone the next day and rings the detective to say something feels off. Colleen Doggett (Bridget Everett), another foster mother, is warmer and no more use. The scene in which two tired detectives list the details that do not quite match and ask Marie whether it is possible none of it happened made us angrier than television usually manages, and nobody in it raises his voice. The men are not monsters, just tired, and they have decided. Marie gives them the answer they want.
Three years later and in another state, Detective Karen Duvall (Merritt Wever) is called to a flat in Colorado where a student has been raped by a masked man who took photographs. Her interview is the first episode played back with decency restored: she tells the woman she can stop whenever she likes, explains each step before she takes it, and writes down what she is told. Then Detective Grace Rasmussen (Toni Collette), with a similar case in the next jurisdiction, turns up with the manner of someone who assumes you are wasting her time. Wever plays Duvall watchful and easily hurt; Collette plays Rasmussen loud and permanently in a hurry. They are written as an odd couple, the careful one and the brusque one, and both are good enough to get away with it. Julie Berghoff’s production design gives Marie a flat of pale plywood and donated furniture, and the detectives squad rooms with sunlight in them.
The flaws are in the middle. Around the fifth episode the Colorado strand settles into whiteboards, database searches and meetings about jurisdiction, and we noticed we had become comfortable, which is not what the series is for. Brooke Smith, as the therapist Dara Kaplan, is given scenes that explain what Dever’s face has already told us. Eight hours could have been seven. And the argument is a little too clean: the Colorado detectives get right everything the Lynnwood ones got wrong, and life is seldom so tidy with its lessons.
What keeps pulling it back is Dever. Marie is not written to be liked. She is sullen, she lies about small things, she laughs at the wrong moment, and the series understands that this is exactly why she was not believed. Each time she tells the story it gets shorter and flatter, until she is reciting, and Dever makes us hear the difference. The moment when she looks at Judith and sees the doubt arrive moved us more than we expected, because she registers it and puts it away, as if she has seen that look before and knows what follows.
It carries an 18 certificate and earns it while showing almost nothing. Watch the first episode on its own and stop. Then decide whether you can take the other seven in a run. We took two nights over them and were glad of the gap.
