Critic Reviews

A feminist statement of considerable fury as well as harrowing but soberly managed emotional power.

The film is an effectively dark portrait of open wounds left by Nazi occupation, the past terribly coming to bear on what is meant to be a time of great relief and celebration. It is also a sharp, despondent look at the many compromises women of the past — and no doubt the present — have had to make in order to keep their heads above water.

Ambiguity is the audience’s trusted companion throughout a film that is hard to watch when it needs to be (the public humiliation scenes) as well as a carefully composed, instantly spellbinding character study that takes us back eight decades but is furiously current in its denunciation of double standards and embedded sexism.

The cool surfaces of Woman Unknown hide real pain and fear. Arcel’s tense performance, always on edge and almost always proper, is one of the film’s primary engines of suspense.

Woman Unknown is a harrowing film in which morality and physicality become uncannily entwined, a dynamic el-Toukhy and cinematographer Jasper Spanning gradually explore through visual transformations.

What is predominantly a chamber piece set in dimly-lit interiors draws tension from the specter of violence rampaging on the streets outside.

As director and co-writer, El-Toukhy has created a shrewd and painful movie about the terrible things you need to do to survive, and what it takes to forget those things afterwards.

The storytelling is provocative, with the character study it creates. The performances are all impressive, with the central lead being particularly noteworthy. The film is an engaging dissection of the changing dynamics that were left in place after such brutal and violent conflicts. As a new battle emerged to fight on behalf of huge sections of humanity that were lost, other stories in this gray area are just as enthralling.

The film’s feminism, or lack thereof depending on how you take your empowerment, is a prickly matter by design.

Alas, el-Toukhy takes Woman Unknown on with immense restraint, trading brazen transgression for mysterious subtlety. It works a lot of the time, but at its best, this less-recognizable post-war history seems very recognizable film territory, even if it’s well-crafted.