Despite having a lot on its mind, Haifaa al-Mansour’s murder mystery “Unidentified” is an unfortunate misfire. The Saudi trailblazer — whose 2012 drama “Wadjda” was the first feature shot entirely in the Kingdom, and the first Saudi film by a woman — returns with what ought to be a searing indictment of gendered norms under the guise of nominal progress, via its tale of a police secretary investigating the death of a teenage girl. It has the right ingredients on paper, but its execution is ineffectual: both overstated and under-dramatized en route to a head-scratching conclusion.
Divorced and in her late twenties, Nawal (Mila al-Zahrani) stands out as one of the only women employed at a police station in northern Riyadh. An aficionado of true-crime podcasts and makeup influencers — which, in the film, are smartly combined into a single, macabre point of interest — Nawal, whose job involves digitizing paper files, is often left on the outside looking in, despite her keen eye for detective work. However, her personable commanding officer Majid (Shafi al-Harthi) sees the value in her perspective when a high school student’s body turns up in the desert, and Nawal discerns clues from details which the policemen overlook, from the girl’s manicure to the embroidery on her abaya.
