Unidentified

I feel like I say some variation on this every time I see something released by Sony Pictures Classics these days, but it's odd that I'm heading out to Arlington to see this one, rather than it playing in Kendall Square or at the Coolidge. SPC used to be the Kendall's bread and butter, putting out a bunch of foreign and indie material that maybe wasn't as high-profile as what Focus, Searchlight, and the Weinstein Company picked up, but there was something new every couple weeks. It's a different world, now - streamers hoover worldwide rights up up so things don't get theatrical releases abroad, Neon and A24 want to be late Miramax more than early Miramax, Kendall Square has chosen to focus more on mainstream fare than boutique fare since the pandemic, as has the Coolidge to a lesser extent (they've added two screens but play more mainstream material), while AMC Boston Common is casting a larger net with fancier places nearby, but not so much when there are big releases - and that sometimes means that the unusual releases wind up in Arlington but nowhere else.

It's a bit of a pain; if you use transit, it means transferring to the 77 or 350 bus, or walking a bit from Alewife, which filters some of the audience out, and the layouts could really use an upgrade. Like, if they are showing movies on screen #1 on one day and screen #anything else on another, you go on that first day. But, hey, at least they're open to sometimes grabbing something like this on occasion, even if it is mostly just keeping a screen warm for a week. The area needs that.

Anyway, on another note, I've already gotten one like on the hastily-jotted paragraph I put on Letterboxd while riding the bus, and following it to the person's own review, there's a lot of time on calling this Saudi propaganda. And, sure, I've been thinking that Saudi Arabia has seemed to be making a push to fund and be portrayed more favorably on film recently, although the amount seems to be coincidence; Desert Warrior and In the Grey were delayed a different amount of years each to wind up coming out so close to Hokum. But I don't know to what extent this is a propaganda push to make the country look good so much as it's an Arabian filmmaker reflecting a country that is changing but maybe not as fast as some, probably including people like director Haifaa Al-Mansour, may like.

We all fall prey to this, whether it's trying to wedge every movie from Hong Kong into a box about it being about Hong Kong's relationship with mainland China or watching a Vietnamese movie that takes place in what looks a lot more like a comfortable American suburb than the image of the poor farming villages we're carrying from 50 years ago and being surprised. There's truth to both points of view: What it's like to be a Saudi woman is going to permeate Al-Mansour's movies the way China is going to loom over films about Hong Kong whether that's the point or not, and I think a lot of movies like this are going to be made with the folks who live in the middle-class neighborhoods where the malls and multiplexes are and can afford to go to the movies in mind, reflecting their lives (and be aspirational for others).

Ultimately, Unidentified feels more like the sort of movie that someone like Al-Mansour who has lived and worked internationally and seen changes in her homeland would find to be an interesting yarn about its present, more so than something aiming to make a point, and certainly not to outsiders. If KSA was looking to use it to present itself as a more modern, liberal country than it is, they've certainly got the funds to four-wall it better! I suspect that it's more the thriller that folks like Al-Mansour and her characters would like to see than how they want outsiders to see them.

I do also suspect that KSA is liberalizing somewhat because its leaders can see the writing on the wall on how good renewable energy and batteries are getting and they're going to have to deal with the rest of the world on the world's own terms and sell their desert grandeur as much as what's underneath, even though the ruling class is not going to let go of power any faster than they can, but that's probably the background more than the point here.


Al-majhoula (Unidentified)

* * * ¼ (out of four)
Seen 21 June 2026 in Arlington Capitol #3 (first-run, DCP)
Where to stream it (when available)

I suspect that many Westerners who see Unidentified will be drawn by the novelty of it being a female-directed/led mystery from Saudi Arabia. That is a thing that, depending on our assumptions, things like it should not exist, but here it is, and it's actually pretty impressive, a solid crime story that plays on the audience's assumptions and satisfies when it reveals the depth of its sleight of hand.

It opens with the body of a young girl being dumped in the desert outside of Riyadh before introducing Nawal (Mila Alzahrani), who has moved to the city since her husband divorced her about a year ago, a box labeled "baby clothes" implying a tragic story. He brother Arif (Mishal Aleanzi) thinks she should move back home, but she seems to be enjoying her job at the North Riyadh police station, scanning documents for digitalization, chatting with Lt. Majid (Shafi Alharthi) over their shared fandom of an Arabic-language true crime podcast (she likes the combination of lurid violence and makeup tips, while he notes the forensic work is surprisingly solid). With the station's sole woman in uniform at training in Jeddah, Majid brings Nawal to the crime scene to handle duties that would be unacceptable for a man. He probably should have predicted that Nawal would start trying to solve the crime herself, figuring the men at the station would not prioritize it.

There's an odd feel to how Nawal goes about trying to solve the mystery, in that she's more or less attacking it like a cop, making lists of possibilities and doing a great deal of footwork to cross things off, even though she is pointedly not one. The crime itself stays tantalizingly out of focus for some time, with the attention not quite shifting to Nawal's life even as her reasons for this being so important to her snap into clearer focus. Director Haifaa Al-Mansour and her co-writer Brad Niemann never minimize the actual crime even as the focus often shifts to what Nawal has to do to make progress in solving it, but they dole out new information slowly enough that the more personal elements have to fill the space.

That's fine, because in a lot of ways the film is what it's like to be a young woman in today's Saudi Arabia, which is in some ways not quite so restrictive as the images that took up residence in this viewer's head around Operation Desert Storm and haven't necessarily been updated despite the occasional news story about women being allowed to drive and movie theaters opening, but that often winds up highlighting just how arbitrary and dangerous the limits that do remain are. Intentionally or not, Al-Mansour plays with westerners' assumptions on that count, and also lets it heighten the tension. There's an extra dollop of danger to every bit of Nawal's amateur sleuthing as the audience is acutely aware, just by the nature of the crime, that she is in danger not just for getting close to the truth, but for being a woman with the nerve to be nosy or exceeding her nonexistent authority. Fascinatingly, the resistance often comes from other women, who often display a combination of having internalized their place in the order of things, fear that they might not be able to get away with what Nawal does, or (especially among the teenagers) nihilistic resignation at their limited futures.

It gives star Mila Alzahrani a lot to work with, and she's magnetic throughout. As the movie goes on, she does great work merging the young woman enjoying freedom and being able to indulge her unladylike interests with someone whose marriage collapsed with tragedy, trauma, and rejection. She's a ton of fun to watch, a little bit cocky and sarcastic and plenty smart. Shafi Alharthi is an enjoyable foil for her, maybe not quite a father figure but likable in how he often seems to respect her even if he's old enough to need some effort to keep traditionalism and condescension at bay. Mishal Aleanzi only has a couple scenes as her older brother but they form a great bookend in terms of being a patrician busybody and how clear it is that he's going to have his sister's back. It also highlights Abdullah Alqahtani's performance as the religious calligrapher/graffiti artist who was close enough to the victim to be the prime suspect - how Arif and Nawal interact helps flesh out Mishal and Amal.

Al-Mansour is good at making scenes like that perform double duty, because this is a mystery even if the themes of grief and needing closure assume greater prominence as the film goes on. She never exactly lies to the audience but she does misdirect, enough to make the end of the movie a pretty nifty set of dominoes as new bits of information click into place. What's great about it as the last act of a mystery is that the flashbacks highlight what was in plain sight as much as what was hidden, with there being a great deal of satisfaction in how people were never truly misrepresented. The characters can be seen struggling with their assumptions, much the same way the audience is (presumably at home and abroad).

The effect is that of a good mystery paperback: A pretty breezy tale that nevertheless has something to say about the environment in which it takes place if one is inclined to look, while also keenly aware that the audience is there to play a shell game with the writers and commentary does not necessarily come before crime. It's a smart genre story that the filmmakers pull back down to earth when it threatens to get too close to prestige drama.