Venice Review: May el-Toukhy’s Woman Unknown Bridges the Post-War Cinema of Petzold and Verhoeven

The war has just ended and the summer has begun. It’s 1945 in Copenhagen, Denmark, and Nazi rule is no more. Hope abounds, but there’s a new hypocrisy afoot in the anarchic phase of society that immediately sprouts up—one that Marie (a terrific Mathilde Arcel) knows the threat of all too well. The Danish nanny and maid has recently become betrothed to the man she’s used to serving, a widower named Christian (Carsten Bjørnlund) who has a lucrative career as a glove manufacturer in the garment industry. All is looking up in May el-Toukhy’s Woman Unknown—the only film solely directed by a woman in Venice’s competition this year—until Marie runs into a man from her past. 

Karl (Thorbjørn Hedegaard), who knows Marie from their hometown, gets red in the face when he drunkenly asks Marie for a drink and Marie flatly says no several times. As if she needs a reason to turn him down, she has a good one: a time-sensitive appointment to get her wedding dress altered. But Karl’s demeanor in the company of his fellow military boys heats up to an uncomfortable temperature and Marie accepts the offer to cool him down, only to bail when he goes up to the bar for drinks, leave the wedding dress behind, and accidentally dox herself in the process. 

In a nightmare scenario, Karl is waiting for her with the dress back at the house, where he causes a minor scene that gets the maid staff talking about Marie’s activities during the war. We never learn how, what, or why, but it becomes clear after Karl’s blatant taunting on his reluctant way out of the house that Marie had some kind of sexual relations with a Nazi that Karl knows about. With her address in tow, he haunts her like a ghost she can’t shake, going so far as to paint a massive swastika across the front door. Meanwhile, a dinner party hangs in the balance, sparking reflection on what really matters in high society circles: what happened, or how things look? Or, perhaps, whether or not there’s a dick in your pants. 

May el-Toukhy’s third feature evocatively examines a rarely observed piece of WWII history: the battlefield of women’s bodies in the spoils of war and those who hid themselves for dear life as a result. In Europe’s pos-twar landscape of unknown women, there are vestiges of other bruised visages, like Nina Hoss’s in Phoenix and Carice van Houten’s in Black Book—the latter of which is channeled in the Danish resistance’s very disturbing public female-shaming rituals where hair is torturously cut, clothes are ripped off, and giant swastikas are painted across the fronts and backs of bodies bloodied and wet with tears.

The hunt in pos-twar Europe for women who had fraternized with the enemy for any reason, crassly labeled “horizontal collaborators,” was a modern witch hunt. Men who did business with the Nazis weren’t publicly brutalized in the streets or even privately maligned—that was societally regarded as having done respectable business. So what if it actually fueled the German war effort? So what if they were direct collaborators? They had no choice. There are no repercussions for them.

The women, however? It doesn’t matter if they had a choice. So much as a flirt to survive under Nazi occupation and they could find themselves at the stake on the street, a self-righteous mob suddenly calling the shots. As the details of Marie’s life rise closer to the surface and distrust sets in from all directions, the cornered fiancé must make impossible decision after impossible decision. The director spotlights the societal pressures with a thick atmosphere of suspense, a gnawing sense of mystery, and a refusal to let any exit serve an easy out, calling into question what route, if any, is a moral one for the troubled Marie.  

Woman Unknown comes across like a tonal and thematic bridge between Petzold and Verhoeven’s films on women after the war—a bridge between primal patriarchal vulgarity and disgraceful secrets kept close to the heart in the immediate aftermath of Nazi tyranny. Still, one would expect the writer-director behind the boundary-pushing Queen of Hearts (remade by Catherine Breillat as Last Summer) to deliver something a little more Verhoeven than Petzold. 

Alas, el-Toukhy takes Woman Unknown on with immense restraint, trading brazen transgression for mysterious subtlety. It works a lot of the time, but at its best, this less-recognizable post-war history seems very recognizable film territory, even if it’s well-crafted. In the past several months alone, László Nemes’ Moulin has occupied the same look and tone: a dark, obscure WWII slow-burn mystery revolving around the resistance. Like Nemes, el-Toukhy chooses a fascinating piece of history to unpack, but her film could be bolstered by a more unique, if not cinematic, approach.

Woman Unknown premiered at the 2026 Venice International Film Festival.