Fest Track On Sirk TV Film Review: UNIDENTIFIED [Red Sea International Film Festival 2025 - Jeddah, Saudi Arabia]
Making a commercial film is no small feat. Integrating it into the regional sensibility but also creating a sense of flow, design, dread, sensibility and narrative structure can be daunting. In this, wrapping the story into a crime thriller genre gives it the strength and perspective needed. With "Unidentified" (Arab Spectacular), director and writer Haifaa Al Mansour creates an interesting almost detective forensics film from the point of view of a woman in Riyadh. The film builds itself up in many different ways but what makes it interesting is the way it eventually uses genre and structure against itself, as so many great movies have done. The key here is Mila Alzahrani who plays a office worker at the local police station who scans in their archives but is overlooked in many ways as a woman in terms of investigative ability. She listen to true crime podcasts but she has the focus and the brain to see the investigations where sometimes here male counterparts can't.
She comes from a recent divorce and the loss of a child right after birth which gives a certain perspective but a different one than would be expected per se. We see her steel. We see her introspective ideals in what people want her to be and what she could be. When a girl's body is found in the desert, it is a unique situation but she takes it upon herself against the want or need of her male co-workers to push the investigation. But the social structure of doing such things and its impact on family reputation and social norm in the region also adds another layer. Al Mansour does a great job as showing these conversations and discussions with pointed specificity while making them part of the crime thriller aspect, thereby giving it a sense of plot motion and not just as a subject. The film also uses established visual methods in a very modern way without disturbing the context of the scenes. The resolution allows for a certain gotcha element but also in the best way where many things are explained while others can live in the viewers mind. B+
By Tim Wassberg
