Helen Archer | On 23, Jan 2024

American Nightmare, Netflix’s most recent viral true crime miniseries, looks, from the first episode, like much of its output – a sensational case, invoking the hit Gillian Flynn book and David Fincher film Gone Girl, in which a woman fakes her own kidnap in order to frame her philandering husband. What it turns into, in a subtle sleight of hand, however, is a scream of frustration at the lengths women have to go to in order to be believed about their own experiences.

Written and directed by Bernadette Higgins and Felicity Morris, who previously worked together on Tinder Swindler, the three-parter tells the story of the 2015 kidnapping of Denise Huskins, snatched from the bed of her then-boyfriend Aaron Quinn during a night they spent together in Vallejo, California. The opening shot – home footage of the couple frolicking happily on a beach – cuts swiftly to Aaron’s police phone call, as he explains, calmly: “My girlfriend got kidnapped last night.” Already, we can hear the disbelief in the voice of the call handler.

Police body cam footage as they enter Aaron’s house cuts quickly to CCTV of the interview room, where Aaron was held for some 48 hours in the immediate aftermath of the kidnap, interrogated and polygraphed by an increasingly hostile investigator. It is reminiscent less of Gone Girl than it is of Netflix’s 2020 documentary, American Murder, in which a husband, Chris Watts, acting worried about his missing wife and children, is uncovered as their murderer.

The facts of the case are, indeed, startling, as told by Aaron to a disbelieving police officer, Mat Mustard. Of being woken by a laser shining in their eyes, the abductor having broken into the house wearing a wetsuit, and forcing the pair to wear blacked out swimming goggles before tying them up and drugging them. Voicing surprise that it was Denise in bed with Aaron – apparently, the kidnapper had originally been targeting Aaron’s ex-girlfriend, but took Denise anyway – he told Aaron not to contact the police, and to await ransom instructions.

It all frames it as another sensational story, a ‘true crime’ to be solved over the course of the series. But by the end of the first episode, Denise has been released outside her childhood home, some 400 miles away from where she was taken – and police interest turns to her. Apparently welded to their theory that this was a “real-life Gone Girl”, detectives do the bare minimum – if that – to investigate. The devastating results are documented in the next two episodes.

Denise’s bravery – and her honesty – shine through the occasionally uncomfortable lingering over her ordeal. She goes into it in excruciating detail in her interviews here and it’s illustrated further in darkly dramatic re-enactments. But her unanswered question towards the end of the series is what stays with the viewer, the impetus for her activism: “I don’t know what needs to happen to me, to happen to any woman, to be believed.” Her treatment at the hands of the police, the media, and much of the general public, is not merely a shameful, one-off episode, but rather an ongoing and systemic failure of survivors of sexual violence the world over.

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