Woman Unknown

In this gripping third feature by Danish-Egyptian director May el-Toukhy, the citizens of Copenhagen are eager to reclaim the city as their own with the end of the five-year Nazi occupation. Yet those with previous ties to the occupiers live in terror of their fellow Danes, with some of the most vicious forms of retribution exacted upon women accused of past involvement with Germans.

For Marie (Mathilde Arcel), the possibility that her secrets may be discovered instills her with a dread that’s palpable in all her actions, no matter how hard she works to conceal it. A young housekeeper and nanny, Marie is poised to take a significant step above her social station by marrying Christian (Carsten Bjørnlund), the wealthy widower who’s also her employer. But a chance encounter with a man from her past initiates a series of events that put Marie in grave jeopardy. Over the next three days, she makes an increasingly desperate effort to avoid the same ordeal experienced by the unnamed women seen in the film’s most harrowing sequences.

As she did in her bold first feature Queen Of Hearts (2019) — remade by Catherine Breillat as Last Summer (TIFF ’23) — el-Toukhy applies a keen intelligence and an equally sharp rigour to the story of a woman who risks the wrath of a society eager to punish her for any act it deems transgressive. Yet there’s no hint of didacticism in Woman Unknown, only a fierce empathy for its heroine, an ever-escalating sense of tension, and abundant proof of el-Toukhy’s fearlessness as a filmmaker.

JASON ANDERSON

Content advisory: coarse language, crude content, sexual content, nudity, violence