DUBAI: “I was drawn to making a crime thriller because it’s a genre that allows you to ask uncomfortable questions in a very accessible way,” Haifaa Al-Mansour says.
The acclaimed Saudi filmmaker is talking about her latest feature, “Unidentified,” in which a young Saudi police officer, Nawal (Mila Al-Zahrani), investigates the death of a young woman whose body is found in the desert. Initially, the identity of the dead girl is a mystery, and the tight-knit community in which she lived — including her own family — are unwilling to identify her and acknowledge her death.
“The case becomes a confrontation with fear, silence, and the cost of truth, both for the community and for herself,” says Al-Mansour. “I enjoy thrillers because they create momentum, and draw you in, but beneath that surface you can explore social tensions, power structures, and moral ambiguity. For me, the genre was a way to talk about silence, complicity, and courage without making the film feel like a lecture.”
Shafi Alharthi and Mila Al-Zahrani on the set of ‘Unidentified.’ (Supplied)
It later transpires that the dead girl is called Amal, and that she had headed out into the desert for a secret romantic rendezvous. That partly explains her family’s reluctance to admit that the body is hers, but, Al-Mansour explains, “more broadly it is about how a woman’s private choices can be treated as a family’s public burden. I wanted to highlight how silence can feel safer than truth, especially in close-knit communities. No one believes they are doing something cruel. They believe they are protecting themselves. That moral gray area interested me as a filmmaker. The tragedy is not only Amal’s death, but how quickly she is erased.”
The only person who seems determined to uncover the truth about Amal is Nawal. But as a very junior member of staff at the police station, her ideas about the case, despite often being correct, are generally ignored by her seniors (who are almost all men). There are clear — and deliberate — parallels between Nawal’s career and the early stages of Al-Mansour’s.
“Nawal’s experience — being questioned, underestimated, told to be patient or quiet — is something I know very well,” the filmmaker says. “I wanted her struggle to feel authentic: not heroic in a loud way, but persistent. Her strength is not that she never doubts herself, it’s that she continues anyway. That felt honest to my own journey and to the journeys of many women I know.”
Haifaa Al-Mansour (R) on set during the filming of ‘Unidentified.’ (Supplied)
Nawal does have at least one supporter: her boss and mentor Majid, played by Shafi Alharthi. Again, Al-Mansour’s experience was similar. “I was fortunate to have people who may not have fully understood my perspective at first, but who chose to listen and stand beside me. Those allies matter enormously,” she says. “Majid is not perfect; he hesitates, he is shaped by the same system as everyone else. But his willingness to support Nawal, even quietly, reflects the kind of allyship that can make real change possible.”
The chemistry between the two actors is a crucial part of the movie. Both appeared in Al-Mansour’s previous feature, 2019’s “The Perfect Candidate,” and the director says that she wrote “Unidentified” with the two of them in mind and “designed the characters around them.”
She explains: “I didn’t want Nawal to feel like a symbol; she needed to feel human. Mila has an incredible ability to communicate inner conflict with restraint. She doesn’t overplay emotion — you see it in her eyes, in her stillness. She brought vulnerability and strength in equal measure. And Shafi is such a big teddy bear, I knew that he would be sympathetic as a mentor figure, and not too intimidating or rough. Their connection is subtle, based on respect rather than romance, and that was important. Shafi brings warmth and intelligence to Majid. He makes the character believable as someone who is evolving, not suddenly enlightened. That dynamic supports the emotional core of the film.”
Mila Al-Zahrani as Nawal in ‘Unidentified.’ (Supplied)
As she suggested earlier, Al-Mansour was not looking just to create a “whodunnit,” but to use the crime as a way of exploring social and cultural issues. Throughout the film, several of the young female characters express dissatisfaction with gender roles and societal expectations.
“These conversations are happening more openly now (in the Kingdom), especially among younger women,” says Al-Mansour. “There is ambition, impatience, hope, and frustration all existing at the same time. That is what happens during periods of rapid change like the kind we are seeing now. And that is very healthy!
“As a Saudi filmmaker, I’m really excited to add to the discussion on these subjects, and I believe it is important to reflect lived-reality honestly. Cinema has a responsibility not just to celebrate progress, but also to ask what still hurts, what still needs work. For me, storytelling is a way to participate in that conversation, not to give answers but to create space for dialogue,” she continues. “My main goal with this film was to challenge the audience, to present problems that seem to have ‘tidy’ solutions, and then present additional information that throws everything into question.”
What she hopes “Unidentified” will achieve, she says, is to make audiences think about “the cost of silence — and the courage it takes to name what others would rather ignore” and to “question the root causes of these issues, and look beyond the expected conclusion to the difficult questions beyond.”
She concludes: “If the film encourages empathy, conversation, and a willingness to look closer at what we choose not to see, then it has done its job.”
