Haifaa al-Mansour’s Saudi true-crime thriller

The great thing about the crime mystery genre is that it’s so formulaic that the best entries usually use it as an excuse to talk about something else.

Case – or is it a cold case? – In fact : Unidentifiedthe new crime film from director Haifaa al-Mansour, uses the death of a young woman to explore how Saudi Arabia’s overwhelming patriarchy creates both victims and criminals among its female population. Elegant although regularly produced, this classic thriller is ultimately more interesting for what it reveals about the filmmaker’s homeland than for the mystery it unveils.

That’s not to say that Al-Mansour, who broke out in 2012 with the international arthouse hit Ouedjda – the first feature film ever made in the kingdom – doesn’t have a few good twists up its sleeve. For viewers who are skeptical of the film’s polished sheen and familiar tropes, it’s worth sticking around for a finale that’s straight out of The usual suspects. Not only does it make us rethink everything we’ve seen; he is doubling down on his criticism of a country that pushes women to extreme measures.

Given the sometimes open nature of these critiques, it may seem surprising that Unidentified received funding from the Saudi Film Commission, especially given the recent controversy involving American stand-up stars agreeing to control their content while performing for large sums of money in Riyadh. But it is the paradox of a regime that has strived to promote art and culture (the ban on cinemas in Saudi Arabia was lifted in 2018) while trying to maintain a certain level of censorship. At best, as in al-Mansour’s new film, the messages manage to slip through the cracks: no mention is ever made on screen of social or religious oppression, but the proof here is clearly in the pudding.

Or rather in the corpse of a teenage girl, who appears in the desert at the start of the film, triggering a long and tortuous investigation to discover both the identity of the victim and, ultimately, the culprit. The problem is that the detective is an amateur sleuth named Noelle (Mila Alzahrani), a recently divorced woman who works as a low-level clerk at a police station dealing with petty crimes. The other twist is that Noelle is addicted to a podcast (played by Adwa Alasiri) that features both true crime stories and helpful makeup tips, a fun combination of gloss and gore.

The podcast is one of the many ways Unidentified highlights the plight faced by Saudi women, forced to be pretty, pious and obedient housewives, even though they desire something more for themselves. Through nightmarish flashbacks, we learn how this was the case for Noëlle, who tragically lost a child and whose husband decided to take a second wife, as permitted by the laws of the kingdom. Noelle has chosen to separate from him and clings to the mysterious death of a high school student to both mourn his loss and help an anonymous victim that society has cast aside.

The film’s best moments show Noelle quietly investigating the murder while her male colleagues stay two steps behind her. She keeps running into brick walls – whether at the girls’ school, embarrassed by her promiscuity (the victim died while meeting a mystery man before her upcoming arranged marriage); by questioning her mother (Fatma Alshareef), who refuses to mourn the death of her daughter which humiliated the family; or during the pursuit of a street artist (Abdullah Alqhahtani) who sprays Koranic messages throughout the city and seems to be the number one suspect.

As a rookie detective And As a woman, Noelle certainly has all the cards stacked against her. But she ingeniously finds ways to bring us closer to the truth, which speaks to a greater truth about the lives of women in Saudi Arabia. The fact that Noelle can drive around town – Saudi women were only allowed to hold a driving license from 2018 – and conduct her own investigation shows that times have changed. And yet, there is a lot of progress to be made, with the film’s surprising denouement pulling the rug out from under us and commenting on how desperate the situation remains.

In press notes, al-Mansour explains that Unidentified is the third part of a “Saudi trilogy” which began with Ouedjda and continued with The perfect candidateboth of which featured heroines struggling under a system that was slowly and painfully granting women a greater place in society. (Between these two, al-Mansour directed the biopic in English Mary Shelley.) His latest installment takes this storyline to a darker and more twisted place, reinforcing the feeling that things are far from well in the kingdom.

It is therefore a shame that the production of the film does not always live up to the message. Shot in a polished, over-lit style that feels more like television than cinema, and filled with non-stop Hollywood-style music that hits all the required thriller notes, Unidentified is distinguished less by its form than by its content. Yet at a time when various forms of official censorship persist in Saudi Arabia – and now, most likely, the United States – al-Mansour remains a powerful voice of resistance, making films that speak for the voiceless, whether living or dead.