The Saudi whodunit “Unidentified” opens with a shot of a pickup truck driving across the desert; the camera then reveals the body of a dead teenage girl in the sand. The question of who she is, and how she got there, looms over the rest of the film, in which some characters appear determined to forget that she ever existed. If no one claims the body within two weeks, the girl will be buried in an unmarked grave.
The protagonist, Nawal (Mila Al Zahrani), has a job at a police station scanning and digitizing files. She is not a cop herself, but she is a mystery buff; she and her boss, Col. Majid (Shafi Al Harthi), banter about their favorite true-crime webcast. When the case turns up, Nawal spots potential clues that her highhanded male colleagues miss. To Majid’s consternation, she begins to explore the matter on her own, encountering resistance from the girl’s school and family.
But Nawal, who is still grieving the death of her baby daughter, is obsessive in her pursuit. The director, Haifaa Al-Mansour, has described “Unidentified” as the capstone to a trilogy, following her films “Wadjda” (in which a Saudi girl bucks gender norms with her determination to buy a bicycle) and “The Perfect Candidate” (in which a doctor runs for office to get the road to her clinic paved).
While decently absorbing, “Unidentified” eventually goes way more Hollywood than either of those films, with a plot that defies logic (raising issues of both structure and perspective) and undermines the movie’s message — unless the pulpy swerve is itself intended as a kind of statement. Ultimately, Nawal has the right to be at the center of a ludicrous film.
Unidentified Rated PG-13 for murder; talk of rebellious teenage behavior. In Arabic, with subtitles. Running time: 1 hour 39 minutes. In theaters.
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