Delayed Reaction: Victim/Suspect

Premise: Rachel de Leon investigates cases of young women who report that they were sexually assaulted who are then arrested for making false claims.

Let me make one thing immediately clear: the idea of this documentary is great and valuable. It's infuriating hearing about all these cases of police not believing women about their sexual assaults, and it's genuinely dangerous for them to arrest the women based on minimal "evidence" of wrongdoing. Given the difficulty of prosecuting sexual assaults in the first place and the personal difficulty to even report, it's awful to think that people must be afraid of getting arrested if the police don't find the claim credible enough. I really want to make all this clear. I'm very much on the side of the topic of this documentary.

But I sure hated this documentary. I simply hate this style of documentary. It is way overproduced. There are so many unneeded establishing or background shots. I hated all the scenes that played like recreations of discussions that Rachel de Leon had. It all made this feel like I was watching a reality show like The Hills or The Kardashians. It was so polished that it made the topic seem more trivial.

This movie is also way too much about Rachel de Leon. In my Premise above, I was very intentional about how I said that. It's not a documentary about arresting the reporters of sexual assault featuring the work of Rachel de Leon. It is a Rachel de Leon movie about her investigating the topic. I think it's great that de Leon did all this work, but this isn't about her. I was so annoyed every time the movie cut away from a gutting tale of a women who was assaulted then not believed to show de Leon playing Smash Brothers and explain investigative journalism 101.

Here's a quick, imperfect test of a documentary. Look at the title. Victim/Suspect. If de Leon is neither of those, then I don't want her to be the star of this. I kept holding out a - well, hope is the wrong word, but it's the best I've got - hope that the film would eventually reveal that de Leon had a personal connection to this. Like it had happened to her or that one of the stories they’d covers was someone she knew already. Something to explain why she was so central to the movie. There wasn't anything like that.

As I said, I really do think the topic of this doc is valuable. I even think de Leon's work should be celebrated. Surely there must be a journalism 101 rule that a journalist should never be bigger than the story though. That's where Victim/Suspect misses the mark.

Verdict: Strongly Don't Recommend