Normal people cannot understand the inner world of the sexually assaulted person. Their vision may be prolonged and their memory may be changed...
You don't understand, just because you haven't experienced it. This film shows us another world, a world we never knew.
"A 18-year-old girl said she reported the attack was a knife, and later changed to say that everything she made up, this is the beginning of the story." Phrase from the prologue non-profit news organization's website, "Marshall Project" in 2015 released The article "An Incredible Rape Case" was written by two investigative reporters from ProPublica, who won the Pulitzer Prize for Interpretive Reporting the following year.
In 2008, the 18-year-old woman named Mary reported that she had been raped. Mary told the police that while she was asleep, a stranger with a knife broke into her apartment in Linwood, Washington, tied her up with a shoelace, blindfolded her and treated her for the next four hours. Repeated assaults were carried out. The perpetrator recorded the sexual assault with a camera and threatened Marie that if she called the police, these photos would appear online. The series opens with such a heart-wrenching plot, a poor girl in season, a sexual assault with very limited evidence. Of course, the problem is far more than that. According to a survey conducted by the US anti-sexual violence organization RAINN, in fact, three-quarters of sexual assault victims have not reported the crime. In addition to internal factors such as guilt and self-blame, they are often because they are afraid of retaliation or that the police cannot provide effective information. help.
In this case, ignoring the threat and choosing to report to the police immediately was a brave and correct choice Mary made. However, unfortunately, the follow-up investigation failed her bravery, from the police to her friends, and even her previous Of her foster parents, almost no one believes what happened to her. Everyone thinks that she is just making up stories and is eager to get more attention. Because there is too little evidence in this case, even hair and fingerprints are difficult to extract, so this story is really " unbelievable ."
The word "unbelievable" was used in the title of the report and also became the title of the show. The eight-episode mini-series based on this real event is a very representative female drama, except that it focuses on female stories. Its main creative behind the scenes is also mainly female. For example, one of the screenwriters and directors of this play is Susanna Grant, who was nominated for an Oscar, and her most representative work is also a female theme, that is, one of Julia Roberts’ masterpieces "Yong No compromise"
Susanna Grant is the screenwriter of "Never Compromise". This time, she is also one of the screenwriters and directors of "Unbelievable" and the show runner of the show. She also established the main theme of the show from a female perspective. As for the main creative team of "Unbelievable", there is also an important female director joining Lisa Charrodenko. Yes, she is the director of "The Children Are Very Good" and has also participated in the directing of the American TV series "Latin America". "The word is supreme" and "under six feet." Of course, Lisa Charrodenko’s most well-known work is also the American drama "Oliv Kittridge" that was very popular in previous years and won numerous awards.
The producer of this drama is the CBS television network, which has rich experience in crime themes and has achieved remarkable results. This drama was purchased by Netflix in 2018 and officially premiered on September 13 this year.
In the past two decades or so, many popular crime dramas have mostly focused on DNA and evidence analysis, emphasizing technology and details, and "Unbelievable" is reminiscent of the human aspect of criminal investigations. Many critics compare this drama with the crime drama "Mind Hunter" which is also based on real crimes. In "Mind Hunter", we follow the psychological profiler of the FBI's Behavioral Science Department into the psychological world of criminals, through tracking, interrogation and Visit to study the motives of serial killers and solve new cases of the same type based on correlation. In "Unbelievable", the creator showed the police handling procedures after sexual assault, as well as the judicial system's frequent failures in this process, and tried to attract more attention to this.
Indeed, in various crimes, victims of sexual assault are more susceptible to suspicion and scrutiny than victims of other crimes. They are often accused of provoking an attacker to get themselves into trouble, or misbehaving sends out the wrong signal. For many victims, the response they receive from investigators and the general public is like a second injury. "Unbelievable" focuses on this distrust of sexual assault victims and how this distrust helps the offender to escape justice.
The first episode of the story took place in Linwood, Washington in 2008. The girl Mary told the police that she was raped by a masked intruder. She was obviously traumatized by the crime, but the trauma was caused by the local police. The way the bureau handles cases has been further deepened.
It was particularly tedious and repeated investigations. They asked her to tell different police officers, detectives, and different investigation departments about her experience over and over again. She was told to recall as specifically as possible how she was tied up. How to be sexually assaulted, all details can not be missed.
Even after the dictation is complete, write it in its entirety.
Soon after reporting the crime, Mary was asked to go to the hospital for an examination, and the whole process was full of embarrassment, humiliation and discomfort.
Due to the hospital's record requirements, she had to repeat her victimization process again to the nurse.
As we said at the beginning, the suspect was very cunning, and the police did not find any evidence at the crime scene, so they began to inquire with friends around her. They found that there were some inconsistencies in the victim's previous statements. In fact, when the victim repeats the narrative, it is common for the details in the memory to become blurred. At the same time, Marie’s former foster mother, Judith, told the police officer in charge of the case in private that Marie’s growth background is a bit special. She may have been abused in her previous foster family, and she had behaved very unusually in the past to attract others. In addition to the situation of concern, her reaction to sexual assault is also very abnormal.
At this time, Detective Parker, who was in charge of the case, did not fully believe this statement, but just a reminder: different victims reacted differently.
But Judith said that he had had similar experiences, and insisted that Mary's performance was different from hers, which meant abnormality.
Day by day, perhaps because no valid evidence has been found, or because Mary’s background and narratives are indeed suspicious, the possibility of " she is lying " gradually formed in the minds of the two detectives. After all, if If Mary is lying, then the case is very simple. As a result, the police began to question her and put pressure on Mary during the interrogation. Through selective information and psychological hints, she was convinced that withdrawing the charges was the best choice that could be made at the moment.
The first episode of the show is shocking. We can see from it how a victim was manipulated by the system that was supposed to protect her to tell the opposite of the truth. This also makes the audience caught emotionally all at once.
After the second episode, another story line appeared. Three years after the time jumped to the first episode, a similar rape occurred in Golden, Colorado. The victim was a woman named Amber. The investigator she faced this time was a caring female police detective Karen Duvall.
Karen will take the initiative to adjust her voice when facing the victim, try to make the victim feel calm, show complete belief in everything she says, and constantly comfort her not to be ashamed and self-conscious. Responsibility, during the physical examination, he was also extremely considerate and always worried about Amber’s feelings.
This picture is obviously in sharp contrast with the opening scene of the first episode. Male detectives pursue facts and details and ignore the emotions of the victim, but Karen shows a more sympathetic side. This is a difference in investigative methods. Explain that empathy needs to be part of the investigation, and sometimes even the key to solving crimes. After all, if the victim is twice injured by the police investigation, it will not only be detrimental to solving the case, but criminals who are at large will continue to commit crimes outside and continue to harm other innocent people.
As Karen continued to investigate Amber’s rape case, she accidentally learned from her husband that the same case had occurred in another area. The person in charge of the case was a police detective named Grace Rasmussen. She has a completely different personality from Karen, and her handling and acting styles are different, but her attitude and goal towards such cases are the same: to prevent this monster from committing more crimes.
In the end, the two protagonists of the show, the female detective duo, gathered.
Such a combination is also very rare in our detective dramas in the past. There may be more detective dramas with double heroes, or more with one man and one woman, but detective dramas with dual heroes are still very unique and interesting. Especially Tony Camelot on the left, some people must think she is familiar, after all, many people still remember that there was a popular horror film "Genetic Doom" last year.
Of course, her performance is completely different from that movie, very powerful.
In the middle of the show, we saw a lot of cumbersome investigations, revealing how Grace and Karen’s team investigated sexual assault cases in seemingly dead-end situations, including searching for suspicious vehicles in surveillance cameras near the victims. A phone call to inquire about the details of each rape case recorded in the police system, and even searched pornographic websites to find out if there might be a photo of the victim.
The detectives in this drama are not as shrewd as those in the previous crime dramas, and the process of solving the crime is also very tortuous and difficult, and they have taken too many detours. Especially when the rapist clearly knows how the police investigate sexual assault cases, he is really very smart. He will ask the victim to take a bath after the end, and take away the sheets, try his best to erase all evidence and leave no usable DNA. , Not even a complete fingerprint can be collected. And his victims are also different in age, race and stature. Therefore, he has no predictable "type" and has never committed multiple crimes in the same jurisdiction because he knows that police departments in different regions generally do not interact with each other. communication. It is precisely because of this that the progress of the case in "Unbelievable" is much slower than the ordinary unit drama, and it was not until the seventh episode that there was a real breakthrough.
But Mary didn't know all of this.
Through the two-line editing used in this play, we can see that when the two detectives three years later were investigating the same rapist with all their strength, Mary three years ago was more and more caught up in admitting to fabricating the facts of the victimization. In a terrible situation, she was called a liar by her peers. The prosecutors accused her of false lawsuits and forced her to receive psychological counseling. At the same time, she was required to pay a fine of $500, which was almost an insulting punishment. After Mary confessed to lying, she lost her friends, her job and her home one after another.
The truth was long overdue. Two and a half years later, Karen and Grace finally caught the suspect on another line. They found a large number of photos of the victims from his house and computer, and in these photos, They found Mary and notified the detective who was in charge of the case at the time. Only then did it formally prove that Mary did not lie.
We all hope that the bad guys will be brought to justice and justice can be done, but sometimes things are not that simple. And this drama tries to talk about the harm that sexual assault brings to them from the perspective of women, as well as many aspects that are not human enough in the torture process.
At the end, people feel a little sad, but they seem to have nowhere to release.
As a female-themed detective drama series, while telling the detective process, she also called for attention to them so that we can see the inner world that we have never understood.
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