Toronto 2026 Review: WOMAN UNKNOWN, Provocative Drama of Survival and Retribution
May el-Toukhy's film, by virtue of winning the Golden Lion, is an automatic entrant into the Best International Film Oscar race.
At the Venice Film Festival, Danish-Egyptian filmmaker May el-Toukhy's third film became an unlikely flashpoint as the only film selected in Competition to be directed solely by a woman. Jury president Maggie Gyllenhaal even decried the "systemic problem" behind the paucity of women filmmakers represented in the lineup.
Woman Unknown, however, had a happy ending: it not only earned Mathilde Arcel the Best Actress award for her remarkable lead performance but also took home the top prize, the Golden Lion, beating the odds. El-Toukhy deserves her accolades: Woman Unknown is a bracing, gutsy film that dares to condemn overzealous purity tests, even among the well-intentioned. It posits that victory over fascists is dearly paid for if the noble victors become just as fascistic.
Woman Unknown is a pointedly domestic postwar drama set in Copenhagen after Denmark's liberation from German occupation. We follow Marie (Mathilde Arcel), head maid and nanny to Leonora, the daughter of Christian (Carsten Bjørnlund). Marie has ascended from servant to Christian's romantic partner and fiancée after his wife's death. Marie is decent and diligent, and a kind future stepmother to the forlorn Leonora. But Marie is also a woman of secrets.
One day, she encounters an unwelcome young man on the subway, Karl (Thorbjørn Hedegaard), a specter from her checkered past, appearing at the most inopportunate moment possible. He realizes she is about to rise to immense wealth and status, and his knowledge gives him the power to blackmail, torment and ultimately humiliate her.
It isn't established whether Karl is part of "The Resistance," but he might as well be. Running parallel to Marie's story is a witch hunt conducted by Resistance fighters seeking to identify, round up and expose anyone who might have "collaborated" with the Nazis. The goal is simple: complete degradation and destruction as retribution.
The vigilantism has a specifically gendered quality: women who might have consorted with the Nazis are stripped naked in public, marked with swastikas and violently shorn of their hair. Such a fate presumably awaits Marie because of what she might have done during the war.
El-Toukhy's boldest gambit is to look the audience squarely in the face and ask, "So what?" Self-preservation might be the most fundamental instinct in human beings and other animals alike. Women, especially, can be powerless in times of conflict. El-Toukhy shows you an imperfect woman and dares you to tar and feather her, like the bloodthirsty Resistance fighters lusting to debase women.
And not to put too fine a point on it, but the Resistance fighters are actually the good guys. What difference does it make, though, when their vindictiveness renders them indistinguishable from that which they sought to defeat? Her critique is powerful precisely because she implicates her liberal audience. In doing so, el-Toukhy follows in the footsteps of great artists: criticizing the other side is easy, like shooting fish in a barrel. It takes more courage to damn your own side.
El-Toukhy grapples with such themes not through didactic dialogue but through a gripping thriller built on unraveling lies and colliding good intentions. She expertly mines palm-moistening suspense from scenes of cold politesse in which one wrong word might cost the heroine not only her liberty but also her life.
Enormous credit is due to Mathilde Arcel, who keeps us on the side of a complicated protagonist even as Marie commits distasteful acts to save herself. El-Toukhy is unsparing and lets the audience stew in Marie's compromises, offering a fraught litmus test of tolerance, understanding and accommodation.
Woman Unknown is modest in scale, filmed primarily in interiors and framed in elegant medium shots, perhaps to avoid extensive and expensive period set dressing. It credibly effectuates a rarefied society with skill and exactitude. Performances are excellent across the board, with Hedegaard contributing menace despite his cherubic visage and Bjørnlund bringing imperious hauteur to his glove-factory baron. Marina Bouras, as Marie's fellow maid, and Sofia Nolsøe, the neighbor tragically entangled in the ghastly affair, also make an impression. The woman who has her hair cut off in the street, seemingly for real, gives an appropriately harrowing performance in a single unbroken take.
Woman Unknown is an exemplar of cinema that entertains even as it needles you. If, in the end, you feel slightly mortified by your response to Marie and her predicament, that is exactly what el-Toukhy intended.
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