The Unknown Girl review: The Dardennes return with a film boasting a superb central performance, though almost everything else fails to impress.
The Unknown Girl review from the Cannes Film Festival, 2016.
The Unknown Girl review
The Unknown Girl, the new film from the Dardenne brothers, Jean-Pierre and Luc (Two Days and One Night), tells the story of Belgian doctor Dr. Jenny Davin, who runs a small GP practise in an urban suburb of Liège.
The film opens with the young doctor barracking a male intern Julian late one evening, which results in the medical student givng the cold shoulder following an incident in the practise’s waiting room. As they’re about to leave, the pair hear the front-door buzzer, though choose to ignore it as they’ve well overrun their long day of consultations. The following morning, two police inspectors come knocking at the door to ask to see the surgery’s CCTV system as the body of a teenager has been found behind the building overnight. The body transpires to be the girl who needed help that previous evening, which is all evident from the CCTV which shows footage of a young prostitute desperately seeking help, someone apparently chasing after her. For the rest of the film, Dr. Jenny attempts to piece together the girl’s fateful last hours in an attempt to find her true identity, and at the same time, put some of her own personal, guilt-ridden demons to rest.
The Unknown Girl review
The Unknown Girl is presented almost like an extended TV special, the kind of thing that one may find playing on ITV4 or BBC 2 on a lazy Sunday evening. The film plays with no soundtrack, and all of the camera work is handheld. There’s hardly any cinematic quality to it, which surprises as we view it playing in-competition here at the Cannes Film Festival.
The plot is plodding, the pacing of the consistent bum-shifting, clock watching variety, only made vaguely interesting by the strong central performance by Adele Haenel, The actress playing a very plain-looking, weary young medic as make-up free as the film itself, though carries the entire film as we see the story unfold completely from her point of view. Haenel’s performance is particularly clever as her character, like a good doctor, shows hardly any emotional attachment during her relentless pursuit of the girl’s identity, or indeed display hardly any change in expression throughout the film’s running time, though she still somehow manages to impress as the doctor goes about her fulfilling her self-imposed task.
The Unknown Girl review
A a whole, this film failed to grab us on so many levels, bar that striking performance. As mentioned, it would make quite a decent TV movie if 15-20 minutes were shaved off the running time, but as it stands The Unknown Girl is an extremely disappointing film from the usually solid Dardennes, of whom we’d expect so more – so much more.
The Unknown Girl review by Paul Heath, Cannes Film Festival 2016.
The Unknown Girl is awaiting a release date.
