A gripping Saudi thriller that uses the framework of a desert murder mystery to expose the deeper anxieties, silences, and societal constraints faced by women, Haifaa Al Mansour’s Unidentified unsettles, surprises, and ultimately questions the limits of justice. Haifaa Al Mansour’s new film deploys the conventions of a murder mystery to reveal larger truths behind a death in the desert. Review by: Saibal Chatterjee.  

Haifaa Al Mansour’s Unidentified is a tense Saudi murder mystery that probes women’s rights, social conservatism, and hidden truths through the journey of an unlikely female sleuth. A powerful, genre-driven exploration of identity, justice, and resistance.

Haifaa Al Mansour’s new film, Unidentified, is nothing like anything that the pioneering Saudi Arabian director has done before in a career that has made her the country’s most important cinema export. It is a crime drama that both adheres to and subverts the norms of the genre.

The body of a murdered Riyadh schoolgirl is found in the desert. Her identity is unknown and the killer has left no clues. The crime has the makings of an unsolved case until an unlikely sleuth, a young woman who has her demons to deal with, takes it upon herself to get to the bottom of the truth.

A true-crime geek, Nawal, who lives alone in the city after the trauma of losing a young child and her subsequent divorce from her husband, is drawn into the case although she isn’t a qualified police investigator.

She is driven by a personal urge that puts her at odds with a society that would rather sweep the case under a carpet and move on than confront the issues that it raises about the rights of women who want more than what the world they live in is willing to concede to them.

A Society That Prefers Silence

Nawal is employed as a desk person in a police station where she digitizes old files. Her boss, a genial policeman, sends her to the crime scene as a stand-in. It is mandatory for a woman official to be present when the victim of a crime is female. What Nawal sees and learns disturbs her.

Obsessed with not letting the murder victim be buried in an unmarked grave as just another crime statistic, Nawal begins her own probe into the circumstances of the girl’s death, hoping to be able to ascertain her identity and secure for her the dignity she deserves.

That resolve of the female protagonist constitutes the crux of Al Mansour’s fifth film, her most mainstream work to date. Unidentified played in the 5th Red Sea International Film Festival’s Arab Spectacular strand this week after a Toronto world premiere in September.

Al Mansour’s first all-out shot at genre moviemaking pays off because Al Mansour keeps it simple and yet informs the exercise with a keen sense of what women, dead or alive, must reckon with in a conservative society.

The overarching social context of the thriller only enhances the impact of the twists and turns that the plot is replete with. One final reveal, which catches the audience unawares and overturns all that has gone before, changes the contours of the film completely. It leaves us with questions that have no clear answers.

A Relentless Protagonist in a Restrictive World

Nawal, played magnificently by Mila Alzahrani, who teamed up with Al Mansour in a starring role in the director’s last film The Perfect Candidate (2019), is thwarted at every step as she investigates the murder.

Nobody, neither the men at the police station nor the principals of the schools that she reaches out to in search of information nor the girl’s closest friends, all of them on the cusp of adulthood, makes things easy for her.

Nawal, an inveterate consumer of videos by a young female podcaster who intersperses her stories of murder cases gone cold with make-up tips, does not give up. As the determined woman digs deeper, secrets and dangers lurk in the dark shadows of uncertainty. Al Mansour employs unshowy methods to heighten the sense of disquiet that quickly envelops Nawal.

The direct pointers – an unclaimed abaya at a tailoring outlet or a series of religious slogans stencilled on colourful placards by a young male artist – are backed up with camera angles and heights that engender an air of trepidation.

A Filmmaker Consistent in Her Themes

This was the film’s first screening in Saudi Arabia, a kingdom that had no cinema between 1983 and 2018. Yet, Al Mansour, daughter of a poet, developed an interest in filmmaking by watching videos. She started out with a documentary made 20 years ago. That film, Women Without Shadows, homed in on women compelled to subsume their identities under codes of behaviour and gender roles imposed upon them.

It was not until 2012 that the director had her breakout with Wadjda, the first-ever feature film to be shot entirely in Saudi Arabia. Wadjda is about a feisty schoolgirl who enters a Koran competition in the hope of earning enough money to buy her own bicycle.

The director has since made Mary Shelley (2017), an English-language period drama starring Elle Fanning as the titular heroine who has a romantic relationship with poet P.B. Shelley, and the American romantic comedy Nappily Ever After (2018).

Al Mansour’s The Perfect Candidate is about a young Saudi doctor who runs for office in her city’s local elections, forcing her society to change its attitudes to the town’s first-ever female candidate.

Although Unidentified marks a move into narrative territory that the director had never forayed into before, the film does not stray too far away from Al Mansour’s central concern – the trials and tribulations of women who seek to break free and often pay the price for their rebellion. She delivers all the punches that she has to and does so with exemplary precision.