Intense Mystery in the Desert

4 stars

Remember watching The Sixth Sense for the first time, the way the big twist at the end left you absolutely gobsmacked? You couldn’t wait to see it again so you could discover all the clues that director M. Night Shyamalan had sprinkled throughout the film to lead you by the nose into that twist?

There’s a similar sensation to watching director Haifaa Al-Mansour’s new film, Unidentified. The ending will leave you just as stunned as Shyamalan’s film, and I’m sure watching it a second (or third) time will reveal all the ways the director planted seeds in your brain to manipulate you so completely.

Here’s the big difference. The power of The Sixth Sense diminishes with each viewing; it’s just not realistic. If you ended the film without the final show dropping, it would be a below-average horror flick filled with unbelievable characters and predictable jump scares. You can take the twist off Unidentified, and you still have a very strong, character-driven thriller.

Unidentified tells the story of a police investigation into the discovery of a teenage girl’s lifeless body found abandoned in the desert. No one claims the body, so the police start a half-hearted investigation, but the case isn’t a priority in the male-dominated world of Riyadh, Saudi Arabia. The men are just going through the motions for the required three-day waiting period before they can release the body to be buried in an unmarked grave. When Nowall Al Saffan (Mila Al Zahrani), an office temp studying to be a police officer, sees nothing is brewing donw for the girl or her family, she starts her own investigation.

Following Al Saffan as she tried to identify the body, notify the family, and solve the crime is completely enthralling. Zahrani’s pitch-perfect performance, combined with the film’s intricately plotted yet completely believable script, makes for compelling viewing. The way the film weaves her personal story into the plot pulls at your heartstrings as it pulls you into her world.

And what a world it is, at least to a westerner like me who has no real understanding of the Arabic world, a world where a family can murder a daughter who disobeys her parents – actually her father’s and brother’s – wishes. Trust me, there are plenty of jaw-dropping moments in the movie long before you get to the ending, most of them relating to the way women are treated in the patriarchy of the Middle East. 

In the end, it is these moments, both the way they are woven into the script and Zahrani’s portrayal of a modern woman living under such misogynistic conditions, that make the big ending work so well. It’s one thing to suspend your sense of reality to accept that a creepy little kid can talk to dead people; it’s something much more impactful to get hit in the gut with an ending that not only takes place in the real world but that you can accept as justifiable once your heart stops racing.