It’s Not Hard to See How Woman Unknown Won Best Film at Venice

Accepting her Golden Lion for Best Film at the Venice Film Festival last night, director May el-Toukhy described Woman Unknown as being about “the female body as a battleground.” That’s an idea el-Toukhy turns into a subtle cinematic motif throughout her highly-controlled picture, which at times feels like it’s adopted the bleak austerity of its post-WWII setting. In a way, Woman Unknown is an old-fashioned arthouse movie, built as it is around silences, details, small gestures, and repeated visual patterns. Its win did come as something of a surprise, especially after a line-up that included such seismic entries as Rachel Szor and Yuval Abraham’s earth-shattering Gaza war documentary Naza (which won a Special Jury Prize) and expansive masterpieces from globally-adored auteurs such as Lee Chang-dong’s Possible Love (which won the Grand Jury Prize, the festival’s second biggest award).

El-Toukhy is not an unknown, however. Her previous film, 2019’s Queen of Hearts, was an acclaimed, award-winning hit in Denmark; it’s also the movie Catherine Breillat remade with 2024’s Last Summer. Those aforementioned Venice favorites like Naza and Possible Love are excellent, and important, and would have been worthy Golden Lion winners. But Woman Unknown is also a masterful film. And perhaps its understatement, its portrait of poisoned domesticity, was in keeping with what Jury president Maggie Gyllenhaal said at the start of the festival, when she wondered aloud, “Could it be possible that the things that women, having had a different experience of being alive in the world, want to make movies about are not always deemed high art?”

Set in Denmark immediately after World War II, Woman Unknown follows Marie (Mathilde Arcel), a maid who is about to marry her employer, Christian (Carsten Bjørnlund), the wealthy owner of a glove factory. It’s a period of awkward transition, both socially and personally: Marie wakes up in bed with Christian, dons her uniform, then starts tidying up and doing other chores, including serving her boss/fiancée his breakfast. The household has multiple servants, and Marie even has to train her replacement. Marie harbors secrets, too, though the stripped-down narrative plays coy with what those are exactly. She was previously pregnant, by a German. She says her parents are dead, but they’re apparently still alive back in her village, where rumors have spread about her. A young man from her past that she runs into on a tram one day suddenly becomes an almost existential threat. We don’t know what transpired between them, but his embittered words to her — “You should have been mine” — say enough.

Marie must keep her past hidden at all costs, because in the wake of the Nazis’ defeat, Resistance operatives round up anyone who’s suspected of collaborating with the occupiers. Women who’ve had anything to do with Germans are beaten in the streets, their hair hacked off, swastikas painted on their bodies. An employee at Christian’s factory who has roused suspicions is dismissed immediately. All it takes to have your life destroyed, it seems, is one vague accusation from practically anybody. Like just about everyone else, Christian has fully bought into the atmosphere of righteous surveillance and instant judgment. “Everybody has a choice,” he says when Marie argues that some of the people being punished were simply trying to survive; later, when she points out that he also sold gloves to the Nazis during the Occupation, he declares, “I did the only thing I could do.” 

Amid the film’s restrained color palette of steely grays and muddy browns, deep reds stand out, spots of elegance or cruelty: a dress here, a scarf there; a drop of blood here, a swastika there. In a world of desolation, standing out is an inherent risk. El-Toukhy’s camera remains resolutely focused on Marie throughout, a reflection of the constant observation the character seems to endure. Repeatedly, she stands before people like an object to be examined — whether it’s a gynecologist who checks her out early on, or Christian’s prospective financiers who admire the newly produced gloves she models for them. Hanging in Christian’s dead wife’s closet like a silent ghost is a long, elegant wedding dress that Marie must get hemmed so she can fit in it. Christian makes it clear that the dress means more to him than she does; Marie the future spouse is as replaceable as Marie the maid. 

The cool surfaces of Woman Unknown hide real pain and fear. Arcel’s tense performance, always on edge and almost always proper, is one of the film’s primary engines of suspense. (Maybe that’s why she also won Venice’s Best Actress award, despite the fact that the festival generally avoids giving any one competition film more than one major award; apparently, it’s only allowed if the Jury vote is unanimous.) As Marie guides her replacement in how to set a table and the exact lengths and angles at which the silverware must be placed, we sense that this isn’t so much a domestic ritual as it is a way of exerting control over a few small inches of an otherwise irrational world. The actress allows us to enter Marie’s mind, even as we realize that there’s still so much we don’t know about this character and her past. We are immersed in her enigma.