Unknown
A thriller in the Hitchcockian mode, the 21st century processing the decaying vestiges of the 20th. Unlike North by Northwest’s <PERSON>, Dr. <PERSON> (<PERSON>) is not trying to prove his innocence. He’s trying to prove his identity, he’s trying to prove that he existed in the first place.
<PERSON>, an American biologist, is with his wife <PERSON> (<PERSON>) in Berlin for a conference, but one taxi accident and coma later and he wakes up having lost four days and some of his memory. Worse, when he attempts to find his wife he discovers her with an entirely different man who has assumed his identity, his experience, and even some of his memories.
It’s The Lady Vanishes from the perspective of the lady, a conceit that proves far richer, more disturbing and more morally grey than other attempts to merge <PERSON> with contemporary digital anxieties (Flightplan, Disturbia, Eagle Eye).
We put our faith in images and documents, backed by institutions, but this trust is slippery and easily abused, especially in their digital form: the university where <PERSON> works suddenly has a picture of the “new” <PERSON> on its website; the US Embassy can’t replace a passport because it’s closed for Thanksgiving; photographs and surveillance footage are easily staged, erased and manipulated.
In turn, the lack of the “correct” documents brands someone as an “illegal”. <PERSON> (<PERSON>), <PERSON>’s taxi driver, is such a person; as a result she flees from the scene of the accident, a loose end that, because of her status, can unravel everything. <PERSON>’s persistence in tracking her down forces her into story that isn’t truly hers, but in other ways it’s just a logical extension of the struggle she faces trying to earn enough money to afford “legitimate” papers.
Unfortunately, memory is revealed to not be a stable basis for identity either. 285
<PERSON>’s flashbacks are brief snippets seen through a prism, splitting the image into their component colours. A key meeting takes place at an exhibition of portrait photography, faces projected onto other faces.
Ultimately, <PERSON> learns that it doesn’t matter what you did, it matters what you do now. It’s a theory of identity and morality that, appropriately enough for a <PERSON> vehicle, is based entirely around action(s), but ultimately solving the mystery and defeating the enemy involves trusting in those same images – surveillance footage, passport photographs – and in the memories that previously proved so deceptive.
Some will describe the multiple third act twists in Unknown as implausible – and there is a plausibility gap, but on a thematic rather than plot level. Unknown has to work within the narrative conventions of an action-thriller, and as such it struggles to contain the existentialist questions it raises, unable to leave them ambiguous or unanswered.
Compared to the rest of the film, Unknown’s climax is broad – <PERSON> even delivers a badass one-liner before dispatching the villain – and its denouement is excessively optimistic on the surface, even though both leave questions lingering.
But this too is something Unknown has in common with many other <PERSON> thrillers. There’s an inevitable sense of deflation as the inexplicable and uncanny gives way to the logical and psychological. The psychiatrist’s monologue, reducing <PERSON> chilling smile down to a Freudian obsession; the very mundane criminal plot behind <PERSON>’s doppelgänger in Vertigo; <PERSON>’s revelation of the primal scene. These explanations can never fully satisfy; the solution is never as intriguing as the mystery itself. 285