The peach-tinted coloring of the sand fills the frame with quiet solemnity. Visually, Al-Mansour\u2019s approach is middle-of-the-road: it gets the job done without flair. The pacing feels right from the beginning: as the story unravels, the plot points neither dawdle nor lurch too quickly forward.<\/p>\n
Al-Mansour \u2014 probably the most well-known and one of the first women filmmakers in Saudi Arabia \u2014returns with the final film in her trilogy featuring protagonists all with the surname Al Safan, each possessing an unshakeable will to assert her rights as a woman in a society where doing so is often dangerous.<\/p>\n In the first feature of the trio, \u201cWadjda\u201d (2013), a girl fights for the right to ride a bicycle, released five years before women gained the right to drive cars in Saudi Arabia. In \u201cThe Perfect Candidate\u201d (2019)<\/a>, a young woman (Mila Al-Zahrani) runs for municipal office, something women in Saudi Arabia first gained the right to do, along with voting, just four years prior to its release. And in \u201cUnidentified,\u201d a recently divorced young woman (again Mila Al-Zahrani) moves to the city to live alone and work as a file clerk at a police station when the murder of a teenage Jane Doe compels her to solve the case. (The Saudi Personal Status Law was enacted in 2022, expanding legal pathways for women to initiate divorce.)<\/p>\n In each of these films, the subtext is always to showcase the humanity and courage of women in Saudi Arabia, to put a face on the real-life reforms and make them seem less like the exception and more like the rule. And Al-Mansour, with an original script co-written with her husband Brad Niemann, well knows that creating complicated characters forced to navigate tricky situations is more compelling than a heavy-handed sermon to a largely Western audience whose understanding of the Saudi cultural context rarely extends beyond honor killings and the merits of the hijab. That is to say, what Westerners know about Saudi is often skewed or incomplete. As the last film in Al-Mansour\u2019s trilogy, \u201cUnidentified\u201d turns up the heat, making a decided turn into genre filmmaking \u2014 the murder mystery \u2014 where there\u2019s room (finally) for Saudi women to be villainous.<\/p>\n Mila Al-Zahrani, as the lead character Noelle, ably delivers a deeply grounded performance, embodying her steely will and relentless pursuit of the girl\u2019s killer, paired with her ever-present stylish black leather bag. Spurred on by her obsession with the videos of an influencer who combines makeup tutorials with true crime distillations, she uses gender roles to her advantage, getting closer to the women in the victim\u2019s orbit than any policeman could in this observant Muslim country.<\/p>\n Still, the stakes could\u2019ve been amplified: every time Noelle disobeys the orders of her father-like police sergeant, Majid (Shafi Al-Harthi, who also appeared in \u201cWadjda\u201d), she receives little blowback. As she gets very close to solving the case, beyond the subtle eerie noise in Noelle\u2019s apartment on the top floor of her building, intimidation by the killer surfaces too late in the story, muting the viewer\u2019s sense of her being in danger. There is a big twist at the end, that one doesn\u2019t see coming, which impresses. The surprise is clever, but undercuts its emotional impact by arriving without sufficient setup.<\/p>\n If the only way this film distinguishes itself is in its ability to humanize and complicate flat depictions and erasure of Saudi women, that is no small feat. Many different types of women surround Noelle as she attempts to identify the Jane Doe: rebellious teenagers, school principals, widows who value tradition, entrepreneurs, a police officer at her station, even the medical coroner who lets her inspect the body for clues. That kind of intentionality around the ability of fictional narratives to change concrete realities \u2014 the ability to visually imagine change \u2014 creates a living, breathing empathy \u201cmachine,\u201d to borrow Roger Ebert\u2019s phrase. Al-Mansour not only reminds us that movies are supposed to generate empathy, she shows us precisely how.<\/p>\n \u201cAs women from the Middle East, we are often portrayed as victims with no agency. That\u2019s not the full picture. Arab women have sass, hustle, and complexity,\u201d continued Al-Mansour at the post-screening Q&A. \u201cLife in the Middle East can be harsh and demoralizing, and women are a part of that reality too. But we\u2019re not always innocent angels. We don\u2019t always need to be the moral backbone of a society; we can be flawed, conflicted, and problematic.\u201d<\/p>\n In \u201cUnidentified,\u201d women are good, women are bad, and women are everything in between. In a society where a woman\u2019s death can easily go unnoticed, this film makes sure the audience pays attention.<\/p>\n Grade: B+<\/p>\n \u201cUnidentified\u201d premiered at the 2025 Toronto International Film Festival. Sony Pictures Classics will release it at a later date. <\/p>\n Want to stay up to date on IndieWire\u2019s film reviews<\/a><\/a>\u00a0and critical thoughts? Subscribe here<\/a>\u00a0to our newly launched newsletter, In Review by David Ehrlich, in which our Chief Film Critic and Head Reviews Editor rounds up the best new reviews and streaming picks along with some exclusive musings \u2014\u00a0all only available to subscribers.\u00a0<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"\u201cIt\u2019s easier to get away with killing a woman. 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