Woman Unknown Film Review: Cost of Complicity

May el-Toukhy’s Woman Unknown serves as a masterclass in complex, unlikeable female characters and unabashedly fearless storytelling.

Woman Unknown opens in the summer of 1945 in Denmark. World War II had ended on May 5th following the country’s liberation from the German Forces. The summer to follow would be marked by endless celebration as the country and world began to return to a sense of normalcy. During the war, Marie (Mathilde Arcel, of Uniformen) left her hometown to move to Copenhagen and work as a housemaid/nanny to a wealthy family consisting of a widowed father, Christian (Carsten Bjørnlund), and young daughter, Leonora (Flora Yde Sander). Throughout her time working for the family, Marie and Christian began a romantic relationship, and by the end of summer 1945, the two were engaged to be wed. 

As Marie prepared for her marriage, she began to adjust to being the woman of the house rather than one of the many staffers in charge of cleaning it. While she initially comes across as well-intentioned and harmless, it’s clear Marie cannot wait for her marriage to legitimize her socioeconomic ascension. She plays the part of the bashful bride, when really she seems more comfortable looking at her peers as her future servants than she’d ever let on. 

While on the way to get her wedding dress altered, Marie runs into a young man who remembers her from home, Karl (Thorbjørn Hedegaard). Karl corners Marie, forcing her into getting a drink with him to catch up, but through their interaction it becomes clear the meeting has a more sinister undertone to it than can be defined. Karl pushes Marie for details of her new life, which Marie refuses to provide. There is a tension between them that radiates through the screen and into the theater for the audience to feel themselves. 

When Marie tries to sneak out while Karl grabs their drinks, she leaves her wedding dress behind. After trying to go back for it and finding it and Karl nowhere to be found, she decides to return home. Much to her surprise, when she walks in, she sees not only the dress, but Karl taking in the opulent home Marie is about to be the mistress of. It becomes immediately clear to Karl why Marie was so tight-lipped about her new life. After repeatedly asking Karl to leave, Marie is frozen in terror as Karl threatens to tell everyone a daming secret of Marie’s past involving a German officer and putting into jeopardy her promising future before she could ever enjoy it. 

Woman Unknown is a fearless and unabashed swing for the fences that demands the attention of its audience. It’s vulgar and unflinching in its look at a post-World War II Denmark and demonstrates the exact type of bold storytelling that fuels people’s passion for filmmaking. El-Toukhy mixes guerrilla-style shots with traditional clean lines to create a fascinating visual composition to frame a morally complex story. 

While many will think the core of the film has to deal with the concept of being complicit, May el-Toukhy and Maren Louise Käehne’s script makes way for a dissension into a kaleidoscope of moral grey areas and complexities while also digging into our most primal survival instincts. As we watch Marie go deeper and deeper into darkness in the name of finally seeing the light on the other side of the most intensive wealth and social gaps, the questions of moral correctness versus primitive impulses begin to permeate our minds just as much as they are infiltrating Marie’s.  

Mathilde Arcel is transcendent in her portrayal of Marie. In this film, she is given a tireless task of descending further and further into madness as she desperately attempts to cling to a dream that once seemed so near. Her ability to reach new emotional depths without ever seeming to run out of surfaces for her character to bottom out on serves as a true masterclass performance. 

Woman Unknown is unlike any war drama you have ever seen before. May el-Toukhy and Maren Louise Käehne’s story will stay with you long after you leave the theater, weighing countless arguments against one another in an attempt to answer a question that can never truly be solved. Their film adroitly layers questions of morality against acts of survival, weighs social status against the concept of identity and self and asks audiences how they think the complicit should be sufficiently punished in a world that was never just to begin with. 

Woman Unknown (Kvinde Ukendt) had its World Premiere at the 2026 Venice Film Festival on September 6, 2026. The film will also be screened at TIFF and at the BFI London Film Festival.