Regardless of having loads on its thoughts, Haifaa al-Mansour’s homicide thriller “Unidentified” is an unlucky misfire. The Saudi trailblazer — whose 2012 drama “Wadjda” was the primary characteristic shot completely within the Kingdom, and the primary Saudi movie by a girl — returns with what must be a searing indictment of gendered norms below the guise of nominal progress, through its story of a police secretary investigating the demise of a teenage woman. It has the correct substances on paper, however its execution is ineffectual: each overstated and under-dramatized en path to a head-scratching conclusion.
Divorced and in her late twenties, Nawal (Mila al-Zahrani) stands out as one of many solely ladies employed at a police station in northern Riyadh. An aficionado of true-crime podcasts and make-up influencers — which, within the movie, are well mixed right into a single, macabre focal point — Nawal, whose job entails digitizing paper recordsdata, is usually left on the surface wanting in, regardless of her eager eye for detective work. Nonetheless, her personable commanding officer Majid (Shafi al-Harthi) sees the worth in her perspective when a highschool pupil’s physique turns up within the desert, and Nawal discerns clues from particulars which the policemen overlook, from the woman’s manicure to the embroidery on her abaya.
Steadily, Nawal skirts the boundaries of her job and begins her personal investigation, getting into areas and conversations her male superiors both can’t, or won’t suppose to. She quickly bumps up in opposition to resistance from way more prosperous people — largely ladies and different teenage women — who appear to need to sweep the coed’s disappearance below the rug, consistent with implicit understandings about honor, and youngsters being married off earlier than they graduate. Nonetheless, regardless of Nawal having to tread calmly throughout these minefields, Al Mansour’s withdrawn aesthetic method finally ends up largely noncommittal, and rarely enhances the contours of this story.
The protagonist’s obsession with fixing the younger woman’s obvious homicide appears tied to occasions in her previous, which al-Mansour and editors Rafael Nur and Steve Cohen introduce by way of dreamlike flashbacks. Nonetheless, the expression of this motive within the current seldom extends past Nawal telling anybody who’ll pay attention how fixated she is on the crime at hand. Granted, there’s a sly purpose for her verbose method, revealed late into the movie, however till “Unidentified” reaches that time, it lurches alongside whereas unspooling an uninteresting thriller, whose particulars typically fall into Nawal’s (and the viewers’s) lap by way of sheer coincidence.
With out revealing an excessive amount of, this construction from al-Mansour and co-writer Brad Niemann finally ends up having a roundabout purpose too, given a weird third-act twist that renders moot the movie’s complete standpoint, together with its central themes. It’s, on the one hand, a story of a diligent, would-be feminine detective navigating social mores, and ultimately, utilizing them to her benefit. However on the opposite, this top-down description solely works looking back, after the movie has already introduced quite a few scenes of Nawal attempting to extract data by way of the very same conversations a couple of dozen totally different occasions. It’s a little bit of a chore.
There are moments when “Unidentified” looks as if it may need one thing extra nuanced or significant to say, like when characters conflict over the demise penalty in an early scene, or when Nawal begins going through the depths of unstated social rot that also infect well mannered Saudi society. Nonetheless, all this finally ends up swept below the rug in favor of attempting to outsmart the viewer, leaving little by means of coherent narrative evolution; neither of the aforementioned threads is ever adopted up on.
Performed cautiously and convincingly by al-Zahrani, who starred within the director’s 2019 drama “The Perfect Candidate,” Nawal occurs to have the identical surname as her character in that movie: Al Safan. It’s a reputation shared by the younger protagonist in “Wadjda” too, spiritually connecting al-Mansour’s three works about Saudi ladies stepping outdoors their prescribed roles. Nonetheless, “Unidentified” sees this idea manifest as a weird overcorrection, whereby any trace at complexity or moral complication is overshot, because the movie lands someplace within the neighborhood of cartoonish caricature by the point all its layers are peeled again.
There’s, maybe, some hypothetical model of “Unidentified” that leans full-tilt into style delights, in a fashion that feels extra congruous with the ambitions of defying cinematic expectations. Nonetheless, what finally ends up on display screen is interminably uninteresting, each in its visible building and in its haphazard narrative swerves. It’s the uncommon film whose each creative intention will be simply recognized, however whose emotional results are by no means found.
