“It’s easier to get away with killing a woman. Unfortunately, society doesn’t care much when a woman dies.”
It is the reality of life in Saudi Arabia, said author-director Haifaa al-Mansour at the Q&A post after screening film “Unidentified. “The film, which premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival, opens with a truck that rushed off after depositing the body of a teenage girl dressed in a school uniform on an isolated desert top.
The sand’s peach-toned color fills the frame with silent solemnity. Visually, al-Manour is strategy in the middle of the way: it gets the job done without feeling. The stimulation is felt from the beginning: When the story Unavels, the plot points neither Dawdle nor leaning too quickly forward.
Al-Mansour-forever the most well-known and one of the first female filmmakers in Saudi Arabia-recur with the final film in her trilogy with protagonists all with the surname Al Safan, each has an unreasonable desire to assert its rights as a woman in a society where it is often dangerous.
In the first feature of the trio, “Wadjda” (2013), a girl fights for the right to cycle, released five years before women got the right to drive cars in Saudi Arabia. IN “The Perfect Candidate” (2019)A young woman (Mila al-Zahrani) runs for the municipal office, something that women in Saudi Arabia first got the right to do, along with vote, just four years before it was released. And in “Unidentified”, a recently divorced young woman (again Mila al-Zahrani) moves to the city to live alone and work as a file office at a police station when the murder of a teenage Jane Doe forces her to solve the case. (The Saudi Personal Status Act was adopted in 2022 and expanded legal paths for women to initiate divorce.)
In each of these films, the subtitle is always to showcase women’s humanity and courage in Saudi Arabia, to put a face on the real reforms and make them seem less as the exception and more as the rule. And al-Mansour, with an original script co-written with his husband Brad Niemann, knows that it is more convincing to create complicated characters who are forced to navigate in tricky situations is more convincing than a heavy-handed sermon to a largely Western audience whose understanding of the Saudi cultural context rarely extends. That is, what Westerners know if Saudi people are often skewed or incomplete. As the last film in Al-Manor’s trilogy, “unidentified” shows the heat and makes a decided transformation into the genre film creation-murder-mystery-where there is room (finally) for Saudi women to be villain.
Mila Al-Zahrani, as the protagonist Noelle, supplies a deeply grounded performance, embodies her stiff will and relentless pursuit of the girl’s murderer, in pairs with her constantly present stylish black leather bag. She is spurred by her obsession with videos from an influencer that combines makeup study with real criminal distillations, she uses gender roles to her advantage and approaches the women in the victim’s orbit than any police officer could in this observant Muslim country.
The efforts could still have been reinforced: Each time Noelle Oledded the orders from her far-like police, Majid (Shafi al-Harthi, who also appeared in “Wadjda”), she gets a little blowback. When she comes very close to solving the case, in addition to the subtle creepy noise in Noelle’s apartment on the top floor of her building, scary of the killer surfaces too late in the story and pulled the viewer’s feeling that she was in danger. There is a big twist at the end, that you do not see coming, which impresses. The surprise is smart, but undermines its emotional impact by arriving without sufficient installation.
If the only way this film separates itself is in its ability to humanize and complicate flat depictions and deletion of Saudi women, it is no small performance. Many different types of women surround Noelle when she tries to identify Jane Doe: rebellious teenagers, the school’s principals, widows who value tradition, entrepreneurs, a police officer at her station, even the medical coron that allows her to inspect the body for clues. The type of intention about the ability of fictional stories to change concrete realities – the ability to visually imagine change – creates a living, breathing empathy “machine”, to borrow Roger Ebert’s phrase. Al-Manor not only reminds us that movies should generate empathy, she shows us exactly how.
“As women from the Middle East, we are often portrayed as victims without agency. It is not the full image. Arab women have SASS, life and complexity,” Al-Mansour continued at Q&A after screening. “Life in the Middle East can be hard and demoralizing, and women are part of that reality as well. But we are not always innocent angels. We do not always have to be the moral spine of a society; we can be wrong, conflicts and problematic.”
In “unidentified” women are good, women are bad and women are everything in between. In a society where a woman’s death can easily go unnoticed, this movie makes the audience pay attention.
Rating: B+
“Oidentified” premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival 2025. Sony Pictures Classics will release it at a later date.
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