Review: The Unknown Girl (La fille inconnue) (2016)
A doctor investigates a murder victim
The Unknown Girl (La fille inconnue) (2016)
Written and directed by Jean-Pierre Dardenne and Luc Dardenne
Thanks to someone on Bluesky — a good alternative to Twitter if you want one — I was alerted to this excellent drama about a doctor trying to make amends for a woman’s death.
Dr. Jenny Davin (Adèle Haenel), who has chosen to inherit a suburban Liege working-class public health clinic from her aging mentor, is working late one night. She’s supervising an only slightly younger intern, Julien (Olivier Bonnaud) who shows little aptitude for medicine, and when she politely corrects him in his treatment of one patient, he throws a tantrum after the last patient leaves and they lock the door.
As they’re bickering, the doorbell rings. “We already worked overtime for an hour,” she tells him. “Tell them we’re closed.” Julien does so, but continues to act childishly.
The next morning, he quits in a huff, saying he’s leaving medicine altogether. As she tries to talk him down, the doorbell rings. It’s the police. A woman was found dead near here, they tell Davin. They want to look at her security video. Sure enough, the person who was found dead was the same young black woman seen on the tape frantically ringing the doorbell.
No one blames Davin; no one except herself. She knows that he could have saved the woman if she had opened the door and given her refuge from whoever she was fleeing. The police can’t identify the victim, and this being Belgium, they don’t seem very motivated to find out. In an effort to do something for this woman whose death she might have prevented, Davin decides to try to identify her, at least. She takes it upon herself to show a picture of the woman, taken from the security video, to everyone she meets — neighbors, patients, workers where the body was found on a riverbank nearby.
She fits this investigation into her daily work. We see her patiently and competently treating every kind of public health patient — oldsters, children, immigrants, drug addicts, injured workers — and come to admire her diligence and compassion. Centering the narrative on this young woman, the movie eschews the typical male-driven mystery, where an assumption of privilege founded on patriarchy helps ease the investigation for an action-driven man. A traditional mystery also involves complications, red herrings, a clearly identifed villain. “The Unknown Girl” avoids these tropes. Davin’s detective work is simple: show the murdered woman’s picture over and over, to as many people as she can.
Eventually she shows it to some of the right people, which is to say, the wrong people. A visit to a sketchy cybercafe, where everyone denies recognizing the picture, leads Davin into danger. But the true perpetrators are much closer.
The script and direction by the brothers Dardenne — this is the first work of theirs I’ve seen — is quiet, assured, and builds slowly, acquiring tension as her patients and others use their privilege to act childishly or threaten her. Everyone, it seems, from her intern Julien to the sinister men at the cybercafe to her patients’ relatives, feels entitled to act out. Davin, on the contrary, always behaves with professionalism and humanity. It’s these qualities that sustain and preserve her. As for the investigation, it’s less like the complex maze that typifies a noir mystery and more like one of those labyrinths that have only one path to the center. She keeps asking questions. But when the mystery is solved, it’s not because she has finally found the right person and gotten the correct answer. The two people who reveal the mystery come to her.
“The Unknown Girl” is streaming on Mubi.