Doc Corner: 'Victim/Suspect' on Netflix
Saturday, May 27, 2023 at 1:00PM 
Nancy Schwartzman’s latest documentary wades forcefully into sensitive territory. As she had done with (the superior) Roll Red Roll in 2018, she charts stories of sexual assault and rape in places where police, the justice system, and society at large too often find ambiguity and uncertainty. An audience watching Victim/Suspect is probably not among those who do, although I suppose launching on such a platform as Netflix may help capture some viewers whose attitudes towards people like those in Schwartzman’s doc are ingrained enough to need rewiring and allow them the empathy required to understand their circumstance.
As the title implies, Victim/Suspect is about women who have reported the crime of rape and have instead become the one arrested. Whether it be due to apathy or investigative sloppiness on behalf of the police or just plain old misogyny and bias, they end up handcuffed and sent to prison. Charged with the crime of falsely reporting a rape—which, to some of the police featured within the film via videotape, appears to be more offensive than the sexual crime itself. As one officer observes, they need to be taught a lesson for the police time that they suggest has been wasted. All because they can’t find (or don’t care to find) the sufficient evidence needed to believe them.
As Schwartzman’s film notes—there is a reason why the number of women who report having been sexually assaulted to surveys and the number of women who report that crime to the police are so wildly out of sync.
As she did with her earlier film, Roll Red Roll about the rape of a teenage girl in a sports mad small town, Schwartzman keeps things fairly unsensationalized, preferring to let her subjects speak. Here, the filmmaker largely follows a journalist named Rachel de Leon from the Center for Investigative Reporting. The viewer is let into several individual stories of young college-age students (namely Emma Mannion, Nikki Yovino and Dyanie Bermeo) who reported rape and had coercive techniques used upon them once police get a whiff of their case being anything other than cut and dry, black and white. Had they been drinking? Can she remember the exact time the rape occurred or who it was? Well, they may as well slap the handcuffs on them right there and then.
Using de Leon’s eagerness to report on the story as the backbone to her story is smart to some degree. Her own narrative as essentially a newbie to the investigative journalism beat and wanting to make her mark isn’t a particularly interesting one, but she is a quietly interesting watch in a similar way to Zoe Kazan in She Said. It’s easy to be compelled by her desire for not just justice, but understanding as well. The weight of what she is reporting on clearly is not lost on her, but she is also just doing her job as best she can. However, despite following de Leon so closely through all of this, we are rarely offered too much insight into what she’s going through having to report on this sort of story. As a result, chunks of the movie fall flat—there is a reason why Hollywood used to give characters like this a foot chase or a shady truth to unravel.
In a somewhat similar vein, Schwartzman is never able to put any sort of authorial stamp on the material. Like many Netflix productions, cinematography is uninteresting and the editing rather pedestrian. It has an emotional resonance, sure, but with this subject matter I would expect it to. By the time of its modestly happy ending, though, the story feels unfinished despite Schwartzman’s movie never really getting off the ground to begin with. In its most compelling moments, we get to see the unfolding of time-honoured police tactics on young, vulnerable, scared individuals who have had a horrific crime perpetrated onto them. But with too much other stuff going on in the process, we aren’t let to sit with it as much as it should.
This should feel immediate and potent. These stories deserve something more than to just become Netflix content.
Release: Streaming globally on Netflix.
Awards chances: If submitted to the Emmys, I would expect more success than at the Oscars. Like other docs like The Social Dilemma, the TV Academy is a little less highbrow in their attitudes towards this sort of film.
Doc Corner, Nancy Schwarzman, Review, documentaries
Reader Comments (2)
I saw this at Sundance and was somewhat more moved. I do agree with your assessment of de Leon being similar to Zoe Kazan, and I found the moments in which the lack of due diligence so adversely affected those who had reported being assaulted in the first time particularly disturbing and compelling.
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