CinemaNerdz

Movie Review: Complete Unknown

Dina Paulson-McEwen

Alice (Rachel Weisz) is in China cut open by a magician, in an ER room telling a patient to breathe, in Tanzania researching insects, and in a parked car spying on a suburban house. Complete Unknown begins by showing what it is to live as someone who, at the very least, is running from their past and has not developed an adult capacity to deal, and at the most, is inhabiting a semi-psychotic state addicted to deception. The montage, Complete Unknown Posterreturned to later in explanatory voiceover, is one of the film’s most beautiful sequences because it is both gorgeous and graspable.

This snapshot of Alice’s world is interesting but not enough for us to care about her first family then runaway story, nor about a clichéd story of ex-hunting; in this case the ex is Tom (Michael Shannon) and she shows up at his home for a dinner party. The film is missing a narrative – even a vague sketch of one would work, if that opaqueness was conveyed with an intentionality – to show how its protagonists, Alice and Tom, value themselves and their intimate relationships. What we know is Alice left home when she was young, in response partly to being harshly broken up with by Tom, but why she kept running is unclear.

Had there been fireworks between Ms. Weisz and Mr. Shannon, I might have been convinced this was a torn-apart love story along the lines of The Notebook (no one questions why Noah went on to build that huge house himself), but Mr. Shannon seems befuddled, and frankly, bored, by Ms. Weisz that rooting out her intensity for fleeing is both a difficult and an un-compelling task. The problem is, without that insight, Alice becomes silly and Tom even sillier for following her around. What he is trying to suss out is unclear, which makes for uninspired (and uninspiring) film watching.

Yet there is something intoxicating about Alice’s lifestyle and Tom is provoked to see his life choices differently: for him this is a riskier perspective valuing faith in the unknown. As one of Tom’s friends points out, Alice is shameless because she is self-serving, telling lies about her identity, while Ramina (Azita Ghanizada), Tom’s wife, thinks her life is exciting. The redemption of the film wants to be that Tom makes better decisions to serve his own life after seeing how Alice lives hers, but that lesson feels both prematurely conceived and farfetched.

Being perceived as a complete unknown may be different than being one, and maybe for a brief moment in the 1990s it was a sexy thing to be, but identity compiling has changed with social media and constant connectivity. Alice comes off as unstable, aloof, deceitful, and criminal. To say she is not contributing to society through a more normative sense of responsibility would be too preachy for this film, but Complete Unknown does not shy away from showing us Alice in her eerily quiet moments of identity transformation. A complete unknown runs the risk of becoming completely disposable to herself and to others, for which, likely, no amount of post-known can make up for.

Dina Paulson-McEwen

Dina Paulson-McEwen is the author of Parts of love (Finishing Line Press, 2018), a 2017 finalist in the Finishing Line Press New Women’s Voices Chapbook Competition. Her work appears in Flash Fiction Magazine, FlashFlood, Minola Review, Dying Dahlia Review, The Ham Free Press, The Hungry Chimera, and elsewhere and has been exhibited at Hudson Guild Gallery and San Juan Capistrano Library. Dina is the assistant managing editor at Compose | A Journal of Simply Good Writing and an editor at Flash Fiction Magazine. She works with creative thinkers through her company, Aqua Editing. She lives in Princeton, New Jersey.
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