There is a striking early scene with an unknown woman that cuts deep into the sensory motif embedded in the title of May el-Toukhy’s latest film. In the street noise of a Danish town just days after the liberation, a gang of Resistance men carries out its vigilante justice over, in their words, a “Nazi whore.” They scissor her long blonde hair and cut her dress to ribbons, then scrawl a swastika across her bare skin and leave her weeping in the dirt. Somewhere in the crowd, the camera picks out a woman rigid with acute distress. This is Marie, the protagonist of el-Toukhy’s gorgeous, piercing Woman Unknown, a film about the mad postwar reckoning that awaited women whose bodies bore the scars of war.
Woman Unknown opens by denoding the space of its central arena. The camera drifts through the empty, psychotically tidy rooms of an affluent house until it stops on a collared wedding dress. A handful of housemaids, with identical white aprons and a downcast look, slave away to maintain the posh household of busy and often absent patriarch Christian. Somewhere in the middle of its labor hierarchy, is its hardest worker: Marie.
That ghostly wedding dress hangs over the first act like a charged prop the script keeps dancing around, teasing assumptions it later fulfils with relish. Earlier that morning, Marie had sought out her doctor for an essential medication, only to learn that he had been denounced for Nazi sympathies. She is lucky to find a more empathetic gynecologist in his replacement, perhaps the only kind man in her universe, who invites her in for the examination. In the cold gleam of the instruments and through a close-up of her face twisted with pain, we learn she survived a harrowing birth and lost the child. A severe infection she has carried since then turns every intimacy with her fiancé into agony, even after a full pipette of morphine. With no national treatment yet in place, the doctor hands her two bottles as a gift and wishes her the best of luck.
Luck is a word the film keeps sounding, and the further it stretches, the less ironic it feels. That Marie guards a heavy secret is no mystery. While other women are hauled from street corners, having a roof over a head and the poise to carry a convincing aristocratic dignity is luck of a kind — even for an unpaid, overworked servant tailoring, for her own wedding, the dress that still means the world to Christian, as it’s the dress that belonged to the wife he lost to cancer. But the higher the stakes, the sharper the danger. The camera pays respect to Marie’s privacy until she runs into a man from her past, who earns one of the film’s rare extreme close-ups. Hollowed out by war, poverty, and envy at the sight of her fed and alive, he scours for weak points in her armor, driven less by any gain than by the need to see her luck undone.
El-Toukhy’s third feature is woven from an entirely different fabric than Queen of Hearts (2019), settling into an almost paradigmatic scheme of feminist period drama. To a festival regular, Woman Unknown may feel like the hundredth solid European period piece to revisit this over- and under-examined terrain. And yet the film has real flair, carrying something from that cinematic pedigree’s finest tricks and clichés, but knowing exactly where to keep its formalism in check, giving a fresh charge to a familiar fable. There are distant echoes of Mascha Schilinski’s Sound of Falling (2025), in its sisterhood bound by shared trauma told through its subjective camera, which el-Toukhy adopts in a far more laconic register. There’s also something of The Girl with the Needle (2024), mostly in the horrifying ugliness of its urban texture played out against the meticulous set design that el-Toukhy, much like Swedish director Magnus von Horn, handles so well. Above all, the film carries the spirit of the inimitable master Chantal Akerman, from whom the director borrows the cold surfaces of women effacing themselves through stiff, hand-worn house labor.
All of it plays as a metonymic tale of women bearing the scars of war, which connects el-Toukhy’s film to Svetlana Alexievich’s canonical book The Unwomanly Face of War, the great oral history of the Second World War as told by the Soviet women who fought it, and whose fear and pain were long absent from the historical record. Her film inherits the book’s collective voice, besides its ambition to build a symbolic story that never exposes one woman’s particular experience. And it hardly matters what kind of intimacy Marie, or many others, had with the occupiers. Those liaisons were, plainly, a way to stay alive, while the men who did business with the same Nazis go unpunished. For most of the film, el-Toukhy leaves such glaring moral obscenities unspoken for, exposing it instead through her masterful mise-en-scène. For instance, when Marie, sunk in the horse-sized dose of morphine, waits for sex on the bed with her back to the camera’s long shot, a glass door then swings into frame, inverting the visual order of the entire room.
Mathilde Arcel’s performance is a quiet marvel, attuned to everything el-Toukhy plants between her lines with her circumspect body language governed by the survival instincts to push through the new war. El-Toukhy renders Marie’s inner life in intensely haptic terms, with lingering and hypnotic shots on the frangible glass of the kitchen buffet, the wall tiles polished to a shine, the somber deep-blue-and-brown interiors — all of it so cold and faintly menacing. The sleek fabrics of the dresses and the starched aprons lend the women a dignified femininity to hide behind, while the men do nothing but invade and destroy. That palpable, masqueraded fragility charges even the most seemingly banal scenes, like when Christian’s colleagues pass around and examine, by touch, the satin gloves he has given Marie. El-Toukhy makes it feels like witnessing a sexual assault.
There is something almost mystical rising out of this gripping social psychosis handed down through generations of women. Among Woman Unknown‘s most harrowing strokes, and one it misses a chance to develop further, is another inhabitant of this labyrinth-prison: an angelic girl of seven or so who misses her dead mother to the point of the darkest depression. She asks Marie, with unbearable sincerity, whether that suffocating ache will ever ease. Marie tells her simply to learn how to force yourself not to be sad. As chilling as it is, the advice lands as a kind of terribly wrong wisdom, the sort women are forced to take up simply to survive a traumatized, patriarchal order that continues still, even after Woman Unknown’s Nazi occupiers have left the frame.
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