Woman Unknown

May el-Toukhy's third feature is the film that moved her from Danish success story to European prize-winner. Her previous picture, 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 as the only film by a woman in the line-up, and left with the Golden Lion and the Volpi Cup for Best Actress. It was then chosen as Denmark's submission for the International Feature Oscar.

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

Critics received it warmly: 93% on Rotten Tomatoes and a Metacritic score of 84 at the time of writing, with Peter Bradshaw in The Guardian describing 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 places her alongside Thomas Vinterberg and Tobias Lindholm as the Danish filmmakers most interested in the moral cost of good manners.