Woman Unknown: Postwar Paranoia With Hitchcock Echoes — SkimNews
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- "Woman Unknown" is directed and co-written by May el-Toukhy as a postwar Danish drama set in a prosperous Copenhagen apartment just after WWII, where the Danish resistance operated as a secret-police militia
- Marie (Mathilde Arcel), a nanny, prepares to marry aging widower and factory owner Christian (Carsten Bjørnlund), and is asked to wear his late wife's wedding gown
- The reviewer identifies a "pure Daphne du Maurier touch" in the wedding-gown device and notes conscious echoes of Hitchcock's "Rebecca"
- The film depicts Danish women publicly shamed for alleged Nazi collaboration — heads shaved, swastikas painted on their backs
- The reviewer argues this shaming was a way for men to divert attention from their own collaboration, noting Christian's factory would have gone broke without Nazi customers
- IndieWire's parallel review frames the film around "the degradation of women accused of sleeping with Nazis," showing cross-outlet consensus on the central political subject
Why it matters: The film's argument that Danish women's post-WWII public shaming shielded male economic collaborators — including the protagonist's own fiancé, whose factory depended on Nazi contracts — reframes a familiar historical episode as deliberate gendered misdirection, giving programmers a Hitchcockian thriller with substantive political teeth beyond genre pastiche.
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