Start the week with a film: In ‘Unidentified’, lifting the veil off murder in a conservative society

Cultural context is everything in Unidentified (2025). The film’s synopsis – a woman who is a fan of true crime shows gets obsessed with identifying a murdered Jane Doe – sounds garden variety. But the setting – Riyadh in conservative Saudi Arabia – makes all the difference.

Nawal (Mila Alzahrani) works at a police station’s archive, digitising files all day long. She’s the only woman around when her boss Majid (Shafi Al Harthi) is informed about a dead teenager lying in the desert. The girl, later named as Amal, is going to be buried in an unmarked grave.

Although it’s none of Nawal’s business, she makes it her own. Over Majid’s objections, Nawal starts investigating Amal’s background. Nawal runs into barriers every step of the way – at Amal’s school, from her circle of friends, and finally from her family.

Notions of honour, propriety and shame hang over the case. It appears that nobody in Amal’s orbit wants her to be identified, let alone explain what she was doing at the murder site meeting a man. Nawal knows all too well what happens when women wander outside the boundaries that have been thickly drawn around them. A divorcee whose marriage broke down after her baby’s death, Nawal...

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