Review by Eric Hillis
Directed by: Haifaa Al Mansour
Starring: Mila Alzahrani, Shafi Alharthi, Aziz Gharbawi, Othoub Sharar, Adwa Alasiri, Abdullah Alqahtani, Aouhod Aljadaan, Somaya Alshareef
There is a delicious irony in a woman being Saudi Arabia's most internationally recognised filmmaker. When Haifaa Al-Mansour made her directorial debut with Wadjda in 2012 she had to do so while hiding in a van (which she was forbidden to drive). Not only were women banned from making films, but Saudi Arabia didn't even have any cinemas at that time. The global success of Wadjda may well have made the Saudi authorities rethink their policies, with the bans on cinema attendance and female drivers both lifted in 2018. After directing films in the UK (Mary Shelley) and US (Nappily Ever After), Al-Mansour returned to her homeland in 2019 to direct the political drama The Perfect Candidate. While there is still a long way to go, it speaks volumes about the rapid change in Saudi society that a woman was able to make such a defiantly feminist movie with the backing of her country's regime.
Al-Mansour's third Saudi feature, Unidentified, is even more critical of Saudi Arabia's treatment of its female population. It sees The Perfect Candidate's lead Mila al-Zahrani return to play Nawal, a low-level clerk at a rather sleepy police station. Obsessed with a true crime podcast that also doubles as a make-up tutorial (a wry commentary on the commodification of true crime), Nawal hopes some day to become a police detective. For now she has to settle for spending her days scanning and digitising the station's files.
Ironically, Nawal gets an opportunity to take part in a case when the body of a teenage girl is found in the nearby desert. With her male superiors forbidden from touching the corpse, they ask Nawal if she can take a look at the body. When nobody comes forth to claim the girl, Nawal decides to take on her own investigation, determined that the girl doesn't get listed as a Jane Doe.
On the surface, what follows is a rather routine procedural. It hits all the expected beats as Nawal follows a series of breadcrumbs and uncovers potential suspects. But what makes Unidentified so fascinating is its cultural specificity. Movies and TV shows that open with the discovery of a young woman's corpse usually go on to expose the layer of misogyny that runs underneath a specific setting. Because Unidentified takes place in one of the misogynistic societies on the planet, we know from the off that Nawal is up against it. While we all have some awareness of Saudi sexism, Unidentified details its awful effects in intimate fashion, showing its impact on various characters, from friends of the dead girl to her family, who refuse to claim her for fear of bringing shame to their door. There is also a fascinating cultural specificity in how Nawal switches codes, swapping niqab for hijab depending on whom she's speaking with or interrogating.
We've become accustomed to "gender blind" protagonists in films, with female heroines usually behaving no differently than if they were men. Al-Mansour finds clever ways to specifically integrate Nawal's feminism into her investigation. Nawal thinks of lines of inquiry that wouldn't cross the mind of most men, like how she finds an essential clue by visiting the high class boutique where the dead girl did her shopping. Nawal's quest is inspired somewhat by her treatment at the hands of a husband from whom she divorced after he sought to take a second wife when they lost their newborn child. Nawal is simultaneously striking out at her society and a specific man who treated her abhorrently.
As revolutionary a figure as she may be, Al-Mansour's direction does little to make her stand out. Unidentified has a flat aesthetic, and it could be mistaken for the pilot of a potential TV show. But it's enriched by its setting and the central performance of Al-Zahrani, who has become the beautiful face of female Saudi defiance. What ultimately elevates it from a cultural curio to a movie that will spark conversation is its knockout twist, which may prompt a second watch to see just how Al-Mansour and co-writer Brad Niemann put the clues in front of us all along.
