Unidentified Film Review: A Twist Too Far

A true crime obsessive looks for answers when a young woman is found dead in Unidentified, a promising crime thriller hampered by a baffling denouement.

Al-Mansour reunites with The Perfect Candidate lead Mila Alzahrani, who plays true crime obsessive Nawal, a receptionist in a Riyadh police station. Nawal’s normal working life comprises photocopying and answering the phones, with the real detective work left to the men, but one day she’s asked to ditch the office and join a team of male cops after an unidentified young woman is found dead in the desert. Not only does the crime resemble the kind of murders she’s used to hearing about online, but as the facts become clearer, its victim seems to emblemise a disturbing truth about women’s treatment in Saudi Arabia.

Being both a whodunnit and a question of whom they did it to, the mystery’s intrigue is compounded. Moreover, the approach to its investigation is refreshingly novel; while the police officers drag their feet, Nawal makes her own inquiries, using her femininity as a tool to access spaces and knowledge her colleagues cannot. A scene in which she dons a burqa as a form of disguise makes for interesting social commentary while also providing a Hitchcockian sense of voyeurism.

Like its affluent setting, the film is at times a little too safe, too clean. A sequence that sees Nawal search the car of a suspect and later chase him through the streets is filmed in a pedestrian manner; one particularly slow-paced tracking shot looks smart, but its smoothness hampers the tension. Similarly uninspiring is how many of the clues and leads come so easily to the protagonist. Perhaps this is an intentional decision to take the emphasis away from the mystery and allow us to focus on the broader socio-political issues at hand, but it leaves entire scenes feeling superfluous.

And then we get to the twist. No spoilers, of course, but just when it appears the film is wrapping up, Al-Mansour and co-writer Brad Niemann perform the ultimate rug pull, forcing us to reconsider everything we thought we knew about the story. The inelegance of the execution is egregious enough, with quickfire flashbacks straight out of a hacky police procedural show, but what it means for the film’s central thesis is worse. It’s a jaw-dropping choice that utterly undermines the ostensible message regarding the commodification of gendered violence by the entertainment industry, pursuing the same cheap thrills it professes to critique.

As the credits rolled, I found myself reflecting longingly on the opening scene. In it, Nawal does her makeup while a woman on TikTok presents an episode of her favourite true crime series, a hybrid of My Favourite Murder and a ‘get ready with me’ tutorial. The juxtaposition is both comic and perturbing, a strange marriage of two phenomena that dominate women’s lives: beauty standards and violence. Suffice to say, the gulf in difference between the film that scene promises and the one Unidentified evolves into is as vast as the Arabian desert.

Unidentified had its World Premiere at TIFF on September5 , 2025. The film will be screened at the Zurich Film Festival on September 28.