Venice Recap: Woman Unknown Enters the Oscar Race

We’re just a few weeks out from the start of scoring for this season of the Movies Fantasy League on October 2. If this Venice dispatch helped you lock in your choices, you can submit your roster now.

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If you were waiting for the Venice Film Festival to give a preview of what awards season will look like, what you got was a mixed bag. This was certainly true at Saturday night’s awards presentation, when the prestigious Golden Lion went to the Danish/Swedish/Latvian film Woman Unknown. The film, directed by May el-Toukhy, is set in Denmark in the aftermath of World War II, as a maid prepares to marry her former employer. Mathilde Arcel also won the festival’s Best Actress award for her portrayal of the main character. Vulture’s Bilge Ebiri called it a “masterful film,” and its victory in Venice means it is now automatically qualified for the pool of films eligible for the Best International Feature Award at the Oscars.

Still, Woman Unknown is not the kind of Golden Lion winner that will set the course of the rest of awards season, as has happened with films like The Shape of Water, Joker, and Poor Things. But as we learned with The Brutalist two years ago, a Venice premiere can make a big splash in the awards race even without winning the top prize. Such was the case with Wild Horse Nine, director Martin McDonagh’s follow-up to his pair of Best Picture nominees, Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri and The Banshees of Inisherin. John Malkovich won for Best Actor, and, combined with the raves he received when the movie premiered at Telluride days later, he’s firmly established near the very top of the Oscars race.

The festival’s Grand Jury Prize — essentially second place — went to director Lee Chang-dong’s Possible Love. It’s his first movie since 2018’s Burning was a huge festival favorite, and while that movie was not able to turn that enthusiasm into an Oscars run, there can be a cumulative effect of having a second straight triumph at the major festivals. Bilge Ebiri wrote that the film “might be the most powerful, political, hypnotic film of [Lee’s] career.” It has been selected as South Korea’s submission to the Best International Feature Oscar race, so you can look to those Academy shortlists in December with some justified hope that Possible Love will make it.

But the film that made the biggest waves at Venice was undoubtedly the documentary NAZA. A late entrant into the Venice lineup (and also the New York Film Festival’s later this month), NAZA is the latest film from directors Yuval Abraham and Rachel Szor, two of the directors on the searing 2024 doc No Other Land. That film, which depicted the forced displacement of a Palestinian community in the West Bank, won the Best Documentary Feature Oscar. With NAZA, Abraham and Szor directly interview 24 Israeli intelligence officers, under cover of anonymity, to get them to describe the planning and execution of the systemic killings of civilians in Gaza. Ebiri called the film a “bombshell,” and the response to the film out of Venice was nothing short of awed. Say what you will about the utility of measuring films by the length of their standing ovations, but the reported 25 minutes of standing applause at Venice does seem to reflect just how much NAZA has towered over all the other films in discussion along the canals.

Of the other films in competition, Danny Boyle’s Ink — about the transformation of the Rupert Murdoch–owned Sun newspaper in London into the beacon for tabloid extremity it is today — drew mostly positive responses as the festival’s opening-night film. It’s a Netflix release and will likely be one of the platform’s top films to push for awards. (The streamer recently announced it will be reporting box office grosses for its upcoming slate of theatrical releases, which means Ink will be one of the first Netflix movies to get public box office numbers.)

Werner Herzog’s Bucking Fastard, starring Rooney and Kate Mara as preternaturally close twins, drew reactions that ranged from delighted appreciation to pure bewilderment. The film doesn’t have American distribution yet, though, so it’s still TBD on whether it’s entering the awards race this year.

Robert Pattinson’s performance as To Catch a Predator host Chris Hansen in director Lance Oppenheim’s Primetime was widely praised, though the film itself was more divisive. And now that You Can See Everything, the film that Oppenheim co-directed with Nathan Fielder, has become the top talk of the festival circuit, Primetime is starting to look a bit more like a backbencher.

It was worse news for Javier Bardem and Penélope Cruz, the real-life married Oscar winners whose new film Bunker got savaged by the critics in Venice. The film’s director, Florian Zeller, has perhaps exhausted the goodwill afforded to him after the Oscar-winning run for 2020’s The Father. The follow-up film, The Son, flopped hard in 2022. And now Bunker, about a prestigious architect (Bardem) who is tasked with building a doomsday bunker for a corrupt billionaire, which Ebiri called “a cliché-riddled bit of tedium,” stands at a lowly 50 on the Metacritic scale. Bardem and Cruz should still be fine, considering she’s in two other Oscar contenders (La Bola Negra and The Invite), and he’s in Dune: Part Three. They may be the only ones who survive the doomsday of Bunker.