Woman Unknown: May el-Toukhy’s elegant postwar drama thrums with tension but rarely connects to anything deeper

• Reviewed from the 2026 Venice Film Festival

The striking seriousness of May el-Toukhy’s Venice Golden Lion winner Woman Unknown is announced from the very first frame. The camera drops in a slow-motion-suicide swoon through the courtyard of a well-appointed apartment block in Copenhagen, the bright square of the sky getting smaller, the darkness gathering. A steady, sparse drumbeat sounds, prefiguring the later sonic motifs of a descending drone or a vocal choir sliding down a glissando. The war has recently ended, and following the brief high of liberation from Nazi occupation, the general mood in Denmark is souring, settling into paranoia and casting around for targets upon which to vent a newly learned savagery. El-Toukhy’s film successfully evokes that sinking feeling. 

Inside, in the largest apartment in the building, Marie (winner of the Best Actress prize in Venice, Mathilde Arcel) rises quietly at dawn, dons her apron and sets about her chores. She is a domestic worker who is also tasked with nannying little Leonora — the blondest child ever born — the daughter of her widower employer, Christian (Carsten Bjørnlund). But a satin wedding dress and quick caress from her boss clue us that her status in the household is changing. She is engaged to marry Christian, the wealthy proprietor of a glove factory. Their unequal relationship, the glamour of Christian’s dead first wife, and the vaguely sinister housekeeper Esther (Marina Bouras) give Woman Unknown a hint of Rebecca (1940). And like in Hitchcock’s film, we’re primed to read Marie’s relative plainness and demure manner as goodness.   

But Marie is not as guileless as she seems. She goes to the doctor for a new bottle of liquid opium, which she needs to dull the pain of nightly sex with her fiancé, and here we learn that Marie has internal scarring from when she previously had a baby. Later, on the street, she shudders as she passes through a heckling crowd gathered around a young woman who is being shaved, stripped and daubed with a red swastika as punishment for sleeping with the enemy. So it is not difficult to discern the dimensions of the shameful secret that Marie is nursing, and which she must keep from a husband-to-be who is rigid about propriety and who expects little less than eternally deferential obedience from a wife forever grateful for her elevation. 

Then she runs into Karl (Thorbjørn Hedegaard) a classmate from back home who knows her previous identity and worse, is still practically sloshing over with blowsy, hormonal resentment at Marie’s past rejection. The walls start to close in: a blood-red painted swastika blooms on the building door, dinner guests start to make their excuses and Karl’s blackmail turns sexual. In her desperation to preserve her tenuous hold on the better life so tantalisingly close to being hers, Marie tries to deflect collaborationist suspicions onto any other woman in her small orbit, from a newly-appointed maid to her bohemian next-door neighbour Ms Berg (Sofia Nolsøe). Marie is very far from good. She might be a monster. 

And therein lies the problem with Woman Unknown and it’s not that Marie is unlikeable; unlikeable heroines are often the most compelling. But, reduced to just her overriding instinct for self-preservation, and given barely a whisper of personality otherwise, Marie lacks complexity, as does much in el-Toukhy and Maren Louise Käehne’s rather blunt and perfunctory screenplay. These are deficiencies that the elegant filmmaking cannot remedy, and more often – some jarringly abstract flashbacks aside — glosses over. El-Toukhy has mastered the art of building tension, but here the tension works on us in a mechanical way, rarely connecting to anything deeper.

Marie’s evident lack of kinship with other women is no reason to feel a lack of kinship with her; the enraging injustices and double standards of stifling patriarchal control apply as much to the worst of women as they do to the best. But we get no sense of how she feels about what she did and what was done to her. Was her relationship with the German occupier coercive? Was it love? Was it just an earlier play for social stability? Despite Arcel’s gravely committed turn (and even she cannot quite carry off the psychology of Marie’s late-breaking loss of control), this unknown woman retreats further from us as the film coils tighter in on her.

This is all thrown into high relief by one remarkable, harrowing public shaming scene. Another unnamed woman (Signe Mathilde Sørensen, delivering an extraordinary, wordless single-scene performance) is having her head shaved in excruciating real time and as the rough, brutal hands of her tormentor hack off hanks of her long hair, leaving her scalp ragged and bloody, her eyes are alive with conflicted emotions. Alternately beseeching and defiant, she goes through jagged cycles of crying and composing herself, of abjectly lowering her head then sticking up her chin again in a heartrending attempt at dignity, We don’t know what this woman did either. But we feel for her as a woman because we recognise her as a person and it’s her gaze, rather than any of the myriad close ups on Marie’s needling self-pity and fearfulness, that haunts us into the credits.