Unidentified (A PopEntertainment.com Movie Review)

PopEntertainment
Jun 18
3 min read

UNIDENTIFIED (2025)

Starring Mila al-Zahrani, Shafi al-Harthi, Aziz Gharbawi, Othoub Sharar, Adwa Al Asiri and Abdullah Al-Qahtani.

Screenplay by Haifaa Al-Mansour and Brad Niemann.

Directed by Haifaa Al-Mansour.

Distributed by Sony Classic Pictures. 99 minutes. Rated PG-13.

You don’t expect a traditional police procedural – a complicated crime story with a twist ending – to originate from Saudi Arabia. Yet here we are – and it is surprisingly gripping, for at least much of its running time.

At its best, Unidentified feels like director Haifaa al‑Mansour (Wadjda, Mary Shelley, The Perfect Candidate) doing what she does best: slipping a cultural hand grenade into what looks like a conventional genre package. The setup is compelling – a true‑crime obsessed woman working in for the Riyadh police copying old case files who suddenly finds herself pulled into the investigation of a teenage girl dumped in the desert. The case is grim, the stakes are real, and the social commentary is baked right in. And for a while, it works. Really well.

Al‑Mansour has always been a trailblazer, and she’s still pushing boundaries here. The film’s strongest asset is its protagonist – Nawal, played with quiet fire by Mila al‑Zahrani. She’s a divorced 29‑year‑old who knows more from murder podcasts than her male colleagues know about basic investigative procedure. She’s smart, underestimated, and navigating a society where even claiming a dead daughter can be a political statement.

As a woman in a conservative religious community, Nawal is not taken seriously as an investigator. Yet, it is her very feminism that allows her to get access to certain areas – a girl’s school and friends, a clothing boutique, the home of the corpse’s apparent family, although they will not admit to having a missing daughter.

It has certain fascinating cultural trappings, like the time when Nawal -- who normally wears a hijab in public, puts on a more conservative niqab (which more fully covers the face, only showing the eyes) in order to surveil some suspects without being noticed or recognized.

It is an efficient and gripping detective story with some very specific cultural seasoning.

Then comes the twist, and it is truly a shock. Only partly in a good way, though. When it first happens, the audience is like, no, that can’t be right. In fairness, looking back the story line does drop lots of little breadcrumbs to reach this spot, to the point that it does make narrative sense. Still, while the surprise is real and sustained, I’m not sure how to feel about it. It feels too melodramatic and it changes everything that you think you understand about a major character. It feels like a twist just for the sake of having a twist.

Unidentified is a fascinating contradiction: a culturally rich, female‑forward thriller that’s both bold and frustrating. When it’s good, it’s gripping, insightful, and refreshingly specific. When it’s bad, it’s bad – but even then, it’s never boring.

If al‑Mansour had cut the film ten minutes earlier, she might have had a minor classic. Instead, she’s delivered a flawed but compelling curio – one that’s worth watching for its perspective, its performances, and its ambition, even if the ending doesn’t necessarily live up to all that preceded it.

Jay S. Jacobs

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=53f9ciNWxFA