Mini-Series Review: UNBELIEVABLE (2019)

In my opinion, "Unbelievable" is the best name that could have been given to this series, because the whole story is so cruel and cold that you don't want to believe in anything happening. It is very difficult to watch, but the difficulty doubles when you learn that the story is based on a true story.

Marie is an 18-year-old girl who doesn't have any real parents but only a couple of foster parents, and she lives alone in her little flat. Then, one day a serial rapist breaks into her flat in the middle of the night when she's asleep, rapes her for hours, take photos of the rape and makes Marie shower eventually to clear the DNA-related evidence from her body.

After the incident, she calls the police, and that's where the problems begin. The police start to focus on the way she recalls the incident, her manners and personality, instead of the incident itself, thus doubting her story and accusing her of lying at the end. What is unconvincing for the detectives is that she is not behaving the way that they think victims should behave after such an incident, which shows us how significant it is to understand the psychology of trauma, especially by the ones that are running these kinds of investigations. The police threaten her with jail and loss of her housing assistance if she doesn't tell the truth (because the police are already convinced that she is lying). Scared of losing her financial aid and going to jail, Marie tells the police that the rape didn't happen in reality and that she made up everything.

Meanwhile, the same type of rapes keep happening, but because they happen in different cities, it is difficult to connect those different rape cases. The rapist knows that there is a weak communication between the police in different cities, so he rapes a woman in one city and another woman in another city to make the rapes seem like single cases every time. By chance, two women detectives realize that their cases are very similar to each other and they immediately realize that they are chasing the same guy. After a very though investigation, they arrest the rapist and he gets sentenced to 327 years of jail. While the women detectives check his photos that he took during his rapes, they spot an unfamiliar face--Marie. After two years of pain, losing her financial aid, friends, and everything because of her accusation of false-reporting, it turns out that she was actually right, but what's gone was gone and no one could ever bring them back.
One of the things that are very remarkable about the story is that while the male detective that run Marie's investigation failed so hard, the women detectives did it almost perfectly. They questioned every single detail and most importantly, they listened to their victims. They didn't fall prey to stereotypes about how someone who's been raped should react. I think it is a very good example of how women can be way more careful and sensitive in such situations, simply because they can relate better to the same fears and feelings that victims have than male officers do.

Moreover, the process of investigation can also be a trauma itself. The victims keep being asked to recall the rape by the detectives, doctors, reporters, friends and family, over and over again, and this series shows the psychological burden of this process on victims in a very realistic and impressive way.

What her psychologist told Marie at the end is worth mentioning, since it is a great way to summarize everything:

So basically, you were assaulted twice. Once by your attacker, then again by the police.