Saudi Arabia breaks into the Lifetime market with murder-mystery Unidentified
Moments of cultural specificity add novelty to a terribly tedious criminal investigation.
Photo: Sony Pictures Classics
The Saudi film production landscape is bigger than ever, this year courting Rise Of The Planet Of The Apes‘ Rupert Wyatt to wrangle a starry blockbuster epic rooted in the country’s history. If Desert Warrior is an attempt at a Hollywood tentpole, Unidentified is a Lifetime original—a broad, morbid, hokey episode of Law & Order: Riyadh focused on the lives that women subtly mold around conservative custom and tradition in Saudi Arabia. It makes sense for Haifaa al-Mansour (Mary Shelley), the country’s first and still most notable female director, to tackle this kind of story, but any insight she may have into the secrecy imposed upon women by her nation’s culture, or the kind of underestimation that such a male-dominated world can lead to, is mired in stiff drama and undercooked mystery.
The premise promises something larger than a simple murder case, as Nawal Al Saffan (Mila Al Zahrani, reuniting with al-Mansour after The Perfect Candidate)—a secretary constantly listening to a “true crime makeup” influencer while digitizing files at the police station—seems to boast something the hapless masculine officers around her lack. Her association with this phenomenon, the overt feminizing of grisly killings by juxtaposing them with beauty tutorials, initially seems to offer some subversive backstory and plenty of detailed potential for this serious take on Only Murders In The Building. Her knowledge of press-on nails, for example, offers something of a lead for a case. But al-Mansour and her co-writer husband Brad Niemann don’t inform Nawal’s character with anything especially specific, no special attention to macabre detail or unnaturally strong stomach that’s been conditioned by her media habits. We’re told she’s recently divorced, and that she’s also just lost her young child, but that’s how much of the film unfolds—told directly to the audience. The plot just happens to Nawal, starting when she’s tapped by her boss (Shafi al-Harthi) to look at the newly discovered body of a teen Jane Doe, found in the desert.
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