Kaitlyn Dever Proves She’s a Force to be Reckoned with in ‘Unbelievable’

The first episode of Netflix’s new crime drama Unbelievable focuses entirely on the crime. We watch what happens when a teenager named Marie Adler (Kaitlyn Dever) reports her rape to the authorities. Through her eyes, we revisit the trauma of the sexual assault, and in real time, we see how the system is bent so perversely that it victimizes her a second time. Marie is not only forced to revisit her trauma, but she is doubted, shamed into retracting her statement, and then outed as a “liar.”  In all, the first episode of Unbelievable is a nightmarish portrait of how sexual assault destroys its victims from the inside out.

The first episode of Unbelievable also only works thanks to the mesmerizing talent of one Kaitlyn Dever. She shows just how devastated Marie has been by this attack not by crumbling, but by holding herself together. In every scene, Dever provides an eloquently understated portrait of a young woman held together only by her own spirit. You get the feeling that she should be about to crumble — it’s in the vacant sorrow in Dever’s eyes or the quiver in her lips — but she never does. It’s this enigmatic display of pain that causes those around Marie to doubt her story, and yet it’s the precise behavior that shows the audience just how badly Marie has been violated by her attacker.

Even though Unbelievable switches to a smashing crime procedural format in Episode 2, Marie is never far from the story’s mind. Throughout the next seven episodes, Unbelievable toggles back to Marie’s journey. What we see is how the effects of sexual assault erode a woman’s life. It’s not merely a one-time violation, but a shift in the tracks of her life, taking her somewhere she never wanted to go.

Marie is especially traumatized by her assault. Not only has she been wronged by the law, but her community has turned its back on her. She has been left isolated, and alone she must do everything in her power not to wither away into nothingness. Again, it is Kaitlyn Dever who manages to express this. Dever has the talent to communicate all this internal tumult with just a few flinches or a change in the timbre of her voice. Where other actresses would need long-winded monologues full of cry breaks, Dever just needs the camera focused on her still face.

Of course, Unbelievable is just the latest showcase for Dever. The actress has been wowing audiences for years in roles as varied as Tim Allen’s spunky daughter Eve on Last Man Standing to Loretta McCready on Justified. This year, Dever had a (literally) splashy, star-making turn in Olivia Wilde’s darkly sweet teen comedy Booksmart. Dever is excellent in all those roles, but Unbelievable proves she’s a force to be reckoned with. She is a talent who can carry the fragile emotional heart of a drama on her shoulders, and she can carry it all the way to the end.

Unbelievable is a spectacular crime drama that pulls together some of the most talented women in Hollywood, but it would fail on arrival were it not for the ferocious talent of one Kaitlyn Dever.

Unbelievable is now streaming on Netflix.

Watch Unbelievable on Netflix