The most interesting idea in Saudi filmmaker Haifaa al-Mansour’s new film “Unidentified” is that of dissonance.
We meet our protagonist, Nawal (Mila Al Zahrani), listening to an influencer talk in gruesome detail about true crime cases while doling out makeup tips – get ready with me while we talk about murder! I love this new lipgloss – and also, let me tell you about the time a serial killer threw a woman’s severed head out of the window of his car.
It’s a smart idea, crystalizing the blasé treatment of violence against women in many cultures, including the one in which Nawal is living and working in. She’s a divorced woman in Saudi Arabia, working as a secretary of sorts for her local police station. But the tension also hints at women’s particular fascination with the horrible things that happen to them. Nawal works at the police station for a reason, and when the dead body of a teenage girl is found in the middle of the desert, she takes it upon herself to investigate – taking seriously what the men around her refuse to.
All of this appears to set up a pretty standard whodunnit within the context of Saudi Arabia’s particular patriarchal society – a place where girls go missing everyday, and no one really seems to care (a teacher at one of the girls’ schools Nawal checks out as part of her investigation answers her questions with, “Do you know how many of our girls go missing every week?”) Right off the bat, however, that whodunnit “Unidentified” (co-written by al-Mansour and Brad Niemann) feels strangely flat, devoid of tension and confusing in its execution. Its final moments, which ostensibly seek to clarify and turn the narrative on its head, only serve to undercut everything we’ve seen before without investigating the ending’s ramifications.
Throughout most of “Unidentified,” we follow Nawal as she investigates the case, doing a number of things she’s not really supposed to be doing (although, her police work at the beginning seems fairly standard, which begs the question – what are the actual police doing?). The dead girl will be buried in an unmarked grave if she’s not identified, and then her body claimed by her family. The police feel like sitting ducks, but Nawal is jetting around town, armed with a list of local schools, following any leads she finds suspicious. She’s thwarted at every turn, by both administrative failures and societal ones.
Throughout the investigation, we see flashbacks that show us why Nawal feels so connected to this young girl (as if anyone needs a reason to be so affected by the sight of a dead teenager). Before she and her husband divorced, they lost a child. Her husband wanted to move on, but Nawal could not.
The film takes a pretty hard left turn in its final moments, but even before that, this investigation feels remarkably dull and ill-paced. The idea of what did or did not happen to this girl – the police lean on the theory that it was an honor killing committed by the family, for most of the film – should be completely engrossing and maddening, but there is something so misbegotten about the way each frame is composed, about the way the action unfolds, about the way each performance is pitched. “Unidentified” is full of ostensibly off-putting angled shots with no real meaning, and every moment of would-be rage from Nawal about the murder feels forced.
The pitch of Al Zahrani’s performance, at least, starts to make a little more sense with the film’s last act turn, but other than that, the reveal feels shocking for shock’s sake. A good twist or third-act reveal should add clarity to previous moments, but “Unidentified” makes less sense after this reveal than it did before. The critique of the patriarchy and violence against women transforms into something far more pulpy and crass, without any interrogation to be found.
