The New York Times by A.O. Scott

The Unknown Girl is as tense as a police procedural, and as mysterious as a religious parable.

Paste Magazine by Tim Grierson

The Unknown Girl isn’t just about guilt but also racism, the folly of pride and our collective need to be absolved for the bad things we’ve done—even if the penance doesn’t fit the infraction. All of this is done masterfully, but I confess it was masterful in just the way I expected. As a result, The Unknown Girl filled me with guilt as well—for not loving it more than I did.

Total Film by Simon Kinnear

The Dardenne brothers deliver a perceptive portrait of professional integrity under pressure.

Washington Post by Michael O'Sullivan

The question that looms large here, lingering long after the closing credits, is whether, despite our human need for forgiveness, absolution is ever truly possible.

Screen Daily by Lee Marshall

If the intimate frame and dour, matter-of-fact aesthetic suggest a return to the raw territory of La Promesse or The Son, what is new here is a flirtation with genre that lends an extra dose of resonance to a finely-scripted story.

Variety by Guy Lodge

Though what we get is largely exemplary: a simple but urgent objective threaded with needling observations of social imbalance, a camera that gazes with steady intent into story-bearing faces, and an especially riveting example of one in their gifted, toughly tranquil leading lady Adèle Haenel. What’s missing...is any great sense of narrative or emotional surprise.

Screen International by Lee Marshall

If the intimate frame and dour, matter-of-fact aesthetic suggest a return to the raw territory of La Promesse or The Son, what is new here is a flirtation with genre that lends an extra dose of resonance to a finely-scripted story.

The Hollywood Reporter by David Rooney

Some of the most acute pleasures here are in the doctor-patient exchanges, depicting with a rigorous absence of fuss or sentiment a relationship that's as much intimate as professional.

The New Yorker by Anthony Lane

You think afresh of the film’s title and wonder, Who is more unknown here, the nameless victim or the inscrutable doctor?

Village Voice by Melissa Anderson

As we watch Haenel — whose piercing gaze is only one aspect of her luminosity — stride through these overdetermined scenes, clutching a medical bag to her side, we are reminded that even the most timeworn of conventions can be made electric and alive.

New York Magazine (Vulture) by David Edelstein

Every Dardennes movie is worth seeing, and The Unknown Girl has all kinds of gripping undercurrents.

The Playlist by Jessica Kiang

The somewhat drab aesthetic and almost vanishingly understated performance style dull the potential pleasures of a good old-fashioned whodunnit to roughly the luminosity of an above-average feature-length episode of a TV procedural.

IndieWire by Eric Kohn

The Unknown Girl combines its naturalistic direction with a strong lead performance and topicality, although these ingredients are hobbled by their familiarity.

Time Out London by Dave Calhoun

Some clunky coincidences and unlikely events confuse the film's mission, and it lacks the clarity and parable-like meaning of the brothers' best films.

The Telegraph by Tim Robey

It’s only in the final stages of assembly that you start to realise some bits are missing.

The Film Stage by Giovanni Marchini Camia

Even the cinematography by the Dardennes’ long-time collaborator Alain Marcoen, usually so instrumental in ensnaring the viewer within their films’ ethical quandaries, is surprisingly flat this time around.

The Guardian by Peter Bradshaw

The Unknown Woman is an odd, dramatically stilted and passionless quasi-procedural concerning a mysterious death; it depends on a series of unconvincing, and in fact borderline-preposterous, encounters and features a bafflingly inert performance from Adèle Haenel, whose usual spark appears to have been doused by self-consciousness.

CineVue by John Bleasdale

A run-of-the-mill, plodding drama, the 'social realism' of which never feels particularly real.