The Unknown Girl

Doctor Jenny has closed her surgery for the day when the bell rings; it is after hours and she does not answer. The police come the next day: a young woman with no identification has been found dead by the river nearby, and the security footage shows her at that door. Jenny is not guilty of anything and cannot put the responsibility down. She sets out to find the girl's name; nobody wants to talk, and the questions start opening what the people around her have been keeping. Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne wrote and directed. Adèle Haenel plays Jenny. It competed at the 2016 Cannes Film Festival and the first reception was cool by their standards. The brothers then did something unusual: they re-edited it. Having planned minor changes, they decided to cut more extensively, ending with thirty-two new edits and a film seven minutes shorter than the Cannes version. Luc Dardenne acknowledged that critics who said certain passages were not working had a part in the decision. Who it is for: viewers who like the Dardennes and moral investigation built on guilt. Who it is not for: anyone expecting a detective story. The film is not concerned with solving a killing but with one person's conscience, and the pace is deliberately flat.