TRIBECA 2026 REVIEW: Unidentified

By George & Josh Bate

Filmmaker Haifaa Al Mansour explores the hidden facets of modern Saudi women through the prism of a whodunnit thriller in Unidentified.

Screening at this year’s Tribeca Festival, Unidentified follows Noelle Al Saffran (Mila Al-Zahrani), a true crime podcast obsessive who moves to the city and takes a clerical job at a police station following a divorce. Everything in her new life is fairly mundane until the body of a teenage girl is uncovered in the desert and Noelle is asked to be present for the initial investigation as the officers need a female present. This sparks an intense fascination with the girl’s senseless and mysterious death, leading Noelle to take it upon herself to solve the murder, despite not having the authority to do so.

Unidentified begins as all great whodunnits do. Al Mansour’s film wastes no time introducing its protagonist, a female traumatized by a mysterious past and situated in a male-dominated work setting, and hooking the audience in with a murder to solve. What is the identity of the schoolgirl in the desert? Who killed her? And why? All these are routine, yet compelling questions that Al Mansour poses to her protagonist and to the audience, in turn creating investment in unraveling the mystery from the get go.

Noelle’s unofficial investigation finds her wandering through the neighborhoods and schools of her city, interviewing people who may know the unidentified murder victim. Mysterious texts from an anonymous person and a group of schoolgirls determined to keep their secrets intrigue and create a mystery that, at least initially, proves rather interesting to follow.

Disappointingly, interest in the murder investigation declines as the film falls into a repetitive and unfortunate narrative structure. As Noelle is not technically a police officer and has certainly not been tasked with investigating this murder, our protagonist clashes with her superiors, who urge her to let the investigation go and return to her clerical work. This kind of ‘stop investigating, this isn’t your job’ rhetoric is often spouted in whodunnits in which the lead detective isn’t really a detective, but rather an amateur sleuth. Unidentified takes this rhetoric too far, however, by dedicating seemingly every other scene of its runtime to a male police officer telling Noelle to cease her investigation. Eventually, it appears that the movie is allocating more time to characters telling Noelle to not investigate the murder than Noelle actually investigating the murder. While this narrative element plays into Al Mansour’s exploration of gender inequality in modern Saudi Arabia and how women are viewed as lesser, it plays rather heavy-handedly and takes away from the film’s most compelling component – its mystery.

As Unidentified increasingly dedicates more time to characters urging Noelle not to investigate the murder, the mystery eventually becomes murky and more difficult to follow. This isn’t because the mystery is particularly complex or nuanced. Rather, this is a reflection of how investment in the intricacies of the investigation declines so markedly as a result of far too many scenes dedicated to less interesting subject matter.

Conversely, Al Mansour’s film finds a point of fascinating novelty when its murder mystery intersects with commentary on contemporary Saudi women. Noelle is introduced to the audience as a woman obsessed with a podcast that serves as both a makeup tutorial and true crime story, a combination one would hardly suspect would be a fixture of the personality of the female protagonist of a Saudi Arabia movie. In addition to exploring the culture of Saudi Arabia and the patriarchal system that traps women and establishes unrealistic expectations of them, Unidentified uniquely situates its commentary on the callousness toward violence and disregard for women into its mystery and, in doing so, presents a whodunnit that makes up for its narrative shortcomings with shocking revelations about how women are valued in Saudi Arabia. 

Throughout the investigation, attempts are made to flesh out Noelle’s character and background. Slowly, we learn about her traumatic past, which informs why she is motivated to investigate the murder of this unidentified girl. Unfortunately, stiff acting from Mila Al-Zahrani and run-of-the-mill character work render her a largely uninteresting protagonist.

The film seemingly wraps up in similarly uninteresting and fairly uneventful fashion before it becomes clear that what we thought was the end was not actually the end. The last 5-10 minutes of Unidentified throw a huge wrench into the proceedings and pack a twist that no one, even the most seasoned of whodunnit readers and fans, could have predicted. When exposed to greater scrutiny, this twist may not entirely hold up. But, if one can overlook the intricacies of its explanation, the ultimate reveal may be one of the best movie plot twists we’ve seen in quite some time.

VERDICT: 6/10

Screening at this year’s Tribeca Festival, Unidentified couches fascinating commentary on gender inequality in modern Saudi Arabia in an initially compelling yet ultimately muddled murder mystery salvaged by one of the best movie plot twists we’ve seen in quite some time.