On its surface, Haifa al-Mansour’s Unidentified is a crime thriller that follows a recent divorcee, Nawal (Mila al-Zahrani), as her true crime obsession emboldens her to investigate the death of a young Jane Doe. She works at a police station scanning and archiving documents, which gives her access, albeit limited, to details of the case. Her motivations are revealed with an exacting clarity: Nawal was married off as a young girl, and when she lost her daughter, she also lost her mind, all before her husband threw her out after threatening to get a second wife. And so, her obsession with identifying the Jane Doe becomes obvious, if also understandably misguided, as she stalks potential suspects.
Unidentified has a habit of laying out its exposition a little too plainly by an architect that is a little too willing. We discover at the beginning that Nawal and her boss watch the same YouTuber, who splices makeup tutorials with a true crime podcast. This reflects one of the many instances where lines of dialogue seem to hover over the film’s drama, a dynamic that is somewhat explained later by the film’s need to foretell the cumbersome twist that arrives at its end. But this over-construction also means there is no specificity to any any of the characters beyond “mother,” “brother,” or “teacher,” which makes the irony of Nawal’s mission of identification seem at once poignant and superfluous in a world that is comfortable with letting its own shame victimize countless nameless young women. But nameless to whom? For most women who experience violence, it is from men they know.
Unfortunately, al-Mansour abandons this train of thought before she even really gets started. Instead, she eagerly borrows from the plethora of American crime procedurals that inflate cable and streaming offerings, sending Nawal on an ill-advised yet morally justified wild goose chase. In this way, the film begins to play like the opening scenes of Robin Hardy’s The Wicker Man, with Nawal searching for a young girl who seems to have never existed — this despite the material presence of her corpse. Justice, then, becomes a project seeped in delusion.
Visually, for most of Unidentified‘s runtime al-Mansour’s direction has the cadence of a journeyman with something to prove. With the assistance of cinematographer Monty Rowan, images do not arrive as apparitions, but instead style is confined to the textually appropriate high horizons that swell the desert’s presence. Nawal’s apartment, meanwhile, is staged like a play, where nothing looks touched or lived in, and there is a tangible distance between her and the space she inhabits, with scenes framed in canted angles that emphasize the literalness of the director’s imagination.
This aesthetic flatness is mirrored in the film’s narrative rhythms, where revelation of backstory through the use of uninspired flashbacks functions to pad the film’s lean narrative. The lulls that arrive between Nawal’s attempts to get a file or question someone she’s not supposed to stretch chunks of the film into what begin to feel like long sketches, but legitimate tension at last finds its footing once Nawal discovers her first piece of concrete evidence in the back of Jane Doe’s cousin’s truck. There’s even a pretty thrilling chase scene shot in one take that follows Nawal as she walks through the ruins of an apartment complex looking for the suspect, bolstered by al-Zahrani’s gripping performance.
By the time we get to the film’s climactic final monologue, which is underwritten but believably delivered by al-Zahrani, you might have almost come to believe the film’s ethos: that our shame cannot preclude us from our human duty to name the dead, to lay them to rest with some dignity. But then there’s a twist, one that won’t be given away here but which evidences an ill-advised decision to discard an already unconvincing effort in the service of, one assumes, creating discourse — which is a shame. The project of managing womanhood involves many layers of complicity. Al-Mansour sketches these layers into a familiar fortress, only to then haphazardly demolish it for the sake of being surprising. Unidentified ultimately lands in a place of sticky ineptitude, demonstrating a penchant for complicating women’s desires and an inability to resist also teaching them a lesson.
DIRECTOR: Haifaa Al-Mansour; CAST: Mila Al Zahrani, Abdullah Al Qahtani, Aziz Gharbawi, Shari Al Harthi; DISTRIBUTOR: Sony Pictures Classics; IN THEATERS: June 19; RUNTIME: 1 hr. 41 min.
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