Subtitles:

English, none

Extras:

Directing-duo Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne have been making slight variations of the same, very good (sometimes great) film for years, so it’s exciting to see the French brothers take their morality tales into the framework of a murder mystery with The Unknown Girl.
The two-time Palme d’Or winners, whose films represent life on the fringes, effortlessly shape simple situations into ambiguous drama. Following their “ticking clock” thriller Two Days, One Night, about a depressed women with only a couple of days to convince her co-workers to give up a bonus so she can keep her job, the Dardenne brothers have devised – once again – a very simple premise that’s a means to observe oppression at a ground level. Although most films of this type are heightened for entertainment’s sake, the genre influences in The Unknown Girl are subdued. A single death, a sliver of corruption and prejudice, is a consequence of institutional and individual malpractice. Everyone is culpable.

Like sculptors reworking the same granite into familiar shapes, Belgium's Dardenne brothers, Jean-Pierre and Luc, always tell challenging, immediate, contemporary stories rooted in the grey, industrial townscape of French-speaking Seraing near Liège. In their latest, the remarkable young French actress Adèle Haenel plays Jenny, a sensitive but no-nonsense local doctor consumed with guilt when a young prostitute is found dead by the river near her surgery.

The dead girl had knocked on Jenny's door after surgery hours and shortly before her death – but Jenny ignored the bell, perhaps removing the only lifeline available in her final minutes. Having rigidly observed the boundaries of her professional responsibility, now Jenny stretches them to find out the girl's name and what happened to her. She wants to do for her in death what she failed to do in life. She even inquires at the local cemetery about paying for a proper grave.

Gary Tooze

February 1st, 2017