THE NOTICE
True crime is on the rise. Whether they be documentaries ( Making a murderer, Ted Bundy: Self-portrait of a killer ) or fiction ( Mindhunter, In their eyes ), the series love these stories drawn from real facts. To the point sometimes to sink into an unwelcome voyeurism. Unbelievable , latest Netflix true crime , proves with brio that it is quite possible not to sink in this way. And even to transcend the police genre to offer a much broader reflection.
The story is that of Marie, 18 years old, a girl with a complicated past, lugged from homes to homes. The series opens with her, trembling, rolled in a blanket, interrogated by a policeman: she tells him that a masked man broke into her home in Lynnwood, Washington, and raped her the night before.
An investigation and a "bad victim"
The result is a long and painful medico-judicial-administrative journey during which the young woman is interrogated, examined, re-examined, escorted home, re-interviewed. Finely, on an entire episode (the first), Unbelievable gives to see the brutality of this process since it is not put in place by trained people. How every word, every gesture, becomes hard and moved in the face of a rape woman.
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Marie has the bad taste of not falling into the category of the ideal victim, the one who remains prostrate at home. In her former foster families, she is far too detached from what she has just experienced. His testimony varies a little, he also knows a tendency to want to attract attention. Soon, the investigators are convinced: she lied. A push of pressure later, Marie admits that everything was wrong.
Three years later, hundreds of miles away in Colorado, Grace Rasmussen and Karen Duvall, two investigators, are joining forces somewhat by chance in serial rape cases that cover their respective jurisdictions. The modus operandi of the aggressor is not unknown to the viewer: a masked man breaks into women's homes and rapes them at night.
"Where is the indignation?"
The Unbelievable series is effective in its round-the-clock journeys between investigation and the broken life of Marie, pursued by the State for false denunciation. It is also so for its examination of the culture of rape. Or how, systemically, society has integrated, accepted violence against women. Throughout their investigation, Rasmussen and Duvall will take this reality in their head: when they will resume sloppy investigations by others, convince skeptical superiors, or plunge into staggering statistics.
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Everything here is true: Unbelievable is the adaptation of an article, published in 2015 by ProPublica and crowned with a Pulitzer, on this incredible miscarriage of justice and the bustling investigation that allowed, years later, the to fix. The series also holds its strength in its ability to let a certain humanity filter, especially through the characters of its inspectors (interpreted by the great Toni Collette and Merritt Wever). But what remains in the end is surely this cry from Rasmussen's heart: "In itself, it's not the fault of anyone at 100%, that's the problem, no one is responsible, no one is interested statistical data on violence against women, and if men were raped as much as women are, where is the outrage? "