Woman Unknown

May el-Toukhy's third feature moved her from Danish success story to European prize-winner. Her previous film, Queen of Hearts, took the audience award in Sundance's World Cinema strand and swept the Bodils; Woman Unknown premiered in the main competition at Venice in September 2026, the only film by a woman in the line-up, and left with the Golden Lion and the Volpi Cup for Best Actress. Denmark then chose it as its submission for the International Feature Oscar.

El-Toukhy writes again with Maren Louise Käehne and works again with the cinematographer Jasper Spanning, who shot Queen of Hearts for her. Mathilde Arcel, in the role that won her the Volpi Cup, plays Marie, a housemaid about to marry her employer (Carsten Bjørnlund); Thorbjørn Hedegaard and Marina Bouras complete the principal cast. The premise is a single celebration in preparation, in a household where marriage is about to close the distance between servant and family, in a country still settling its accounts with the occupation.

Critics received it warmly, with 93% on Rotten Tomatoes and a Metacritic score of 84 at the time of writing; Peter Bradshaw in The Guardian described an expertly managed drama about the return of the repressed. It extends el-Toukhy's preoccupation with what respectable families agree not to see, and puts her alongside Thomas Vinterberg and Tobias Lindholm as the Danish filmmakers most interested in the moral cost of good manners.