A masked man breaks into the apartment of a lone young woman at night and rapes her. But when she goes to the police, she only meets men - and gradually it becomes clear that nobody believes her. "Unbelievable" is practically from the first episode of an outrageous, difficult bearable injustice.
But the sinister appeal of this eight-part series comes to a great extent from the fact that the almost 18-year-old heroine Marie Adler is pushed into deeper and deeper hellish circles in almost every episode. She is forced to withdraw her rape ad. She is publicly attacked as a liar, from the social networks her hatred suggests. Finally, she is even charged with false statements.
The actress Kaitlyn Dever is 22 years old and is celebrated as a young star in the USA for her role in the high school comedy "Booksmart", which will be released in our cinemas on November 14th. In "Unbelievable" she plays the locked, raised in homes and foster care heroine Marie Adler with an oppressive bewilderment.
Her eyes are staring straight ahead into the void when she gets cursed by police and lawyers. Her already pale face seems to bleach a trace when even one of her former foster mothers turns against her. Her arms slink casually on her hips as she gets pulled down by her boss in her supermarket job.
An incredible, but true case
"Unbelievable" is the work of a women-dominated team, including Susannah Grant as lead author and Lisa Cholodenko as one of the directors. The series is based on a true case. He was uncovered in 2015 by an award-winning reporter duo.
The story that tells "Unbelievable" is almost documentary; and she does not just talk about the passion story of a young woman who has to endure absurd humiliation after a crime and is left almost completely alone, but also on the daring years of investigation by two policewomen.
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"Unbelievable": Hardcore detective dramaIn "Unbelievable" the two are played by Toni Collette ("Hereditary") and Merritt Wever ("The Walking Dead"). The rivalry and stubbornness of the two women investigators, their anger at the empathy of their male colleagues, their trips to crime scenes in the picturesque, rugged state of Colorado - that's the stuff that not only creates excitement, but also some funny moments become. Toni Colette's figure conjured up a weary, everlasting smile on the gallows humor. "He's an asshole," she once said of a stubborn witness, a caretaker, "but he's our asshole."
Reconciliation (not) in sight
In some episodes "Unbelievable" looks like a hard-hitting, but quite routine detective drama. You can see the two police officers interrogating grim men and attacked women. The victims of serial rapist, who has also broken into the apartment of the girl Marie Adler, remember in flashbacks to the details of their martyrdom, to their bondage, to the blindfold and the camera, the perpetrators always had it. Against all odds and occasional own doubts about their work, the two investigators succeed in tightening their network by interrogating witnesses again and again, ruthlessly rummaging through and tracking even the most unlikely tracks.
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But the center of power of the series are the scenes in which "Unbelievable" continues the journey of the heroine Marie Adler for months and years. She struggles passionately for the affection of her only confidant, she endures various legal malignancies with silent equanimity, she flies from her job in the supermarket and hires in a scooter ride.
Eventually, however, one of the policemen stands in front of the young woman who helped ruin a few years of her life. The man says he was wrong. The policeman is not portrayed here as a rogue or a stubborn macho, rather as a miserable representative of a social machinery of order that does not provide justice for outsiders like Marie Adler.
First, the heroine does not want to talk to her tormentor, but then she demands an apology. It is a great, heartbreaking scene that follows, about which you can only tell one thing: there can be no question of reconciliation - even one with the circumstances.
"Unbelievable" , at Netflix