‘New’ is a shiny, subjective word which disintegrates upon closer inspection. Something can only be new if it’s new ’to’ something or someone, and new is always yesterday’s news. That’s why reissues and re-releases can be so enticing, whether it’s home media or vinyl reissues or a critical spotlight on something widely missed by the culture at large — discovering something older makes it new again.

The festival scene has produced countless great films that have gone on to find little or no distribution, resulting in a proverbial island of lost toys just waiting to be played. Unidentified was screened at festivals back in 2020, and has only now gotten a home media and digital release from Film Movement, which is a godsend. It’s a masterful crime drama and character study of a possibly corrupt cop, a cocktail of Bad Lieutenant and The Machinist with a dollop of Killer Joe, and it just may be the best re-release of 2022.

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Bogdan George Apetri’s Brilliant Crime Dramas

     Film Movement

Unidentified is actually the first in a very loose trilogy of films from director Bogdan George Apetri, who actually released the second film in the time it took for Unidentified to become available. That film, the crime drama masterpiece Miracle, solidifies Apetri as a director to watch with laser-focused precision. Both films are somehow incredibly tense without compromising an iota of the meticulously patient, artfully obtuse style of their director.

Unidentified develops tension through the art of withholding, chronicling the increasingly desperate but mysterious few days of Detective Floran Iespas (an award-winning performance from Bogdan Farcas, here looking like a withered Keanu Reeves disguised as Adrien Brody). Floran thinks he can solve a case that’s being dragged by another officer, but his commanding officer, Comisar Sef, refuses to transfer him.

This doesn’t prevent Floran from calling in a suspect, the quiet Roman man Banel (a great Dragos Dumitru, who plays him like he was born to be intimidated). Some properties have burned to the ground, and two women were inside one of them when it came down. Floran shows them pictures of their charred bodies in his antagonistic interrogation of Banel, who works at a gas station and has professional affiliations with the owner of the properties. It seems like Floran is pursuing an insurance fraud case that accidentally became a homicide one, and that he’s just an extremely dedicated, borderline obsessive cop, the kind audiences worship on prime-time television. But then something strange happens.

A Desperate Cop and a Mysterious Plan

Apetri is brilliant at laying out a narrative without artificial exposition; he’s filming this loose trilogy in his Romanian hometown, and these movies truly feel lived-in and fleshed-out as a result, never in need of some audience stand-in to detail what’s going on.

Unidentified follows Floran as he seems to be devising some master plan, one which keeps viewers guessing until the very end. He seems to be drowning in debt; is he trying to get some of the insurance money? People ask about his fiancé, but she’s never at his house; is her absence related? Some of the police have obvious bigotry against Roma people like Banel and other “gypsies,” as they call them; are they racially targeting Banel?

Apetri plays his cinematic cards close to his chest, both as a director and co-writer alongside Iulian Postelnicu. Like an arthouse version of Training Day, Unidentified has all the grimy, need-to-take-a-shower-after-watching intensity of Hollywood crime thrillers without any of the emotional manipulation, bloated dialogue, and excess melodrama. It’s as lean and enigmatic as its bruised and brooding leading man, and slowly reveals that there are neither protagonists nor justice in this kind of law and order.

Unidentified is Both Topical and Timeless

Unidentified feels surprisingly universal for a film set in the small mountainous towns of Romania. Its study of entitlement, sexism, self-destruction, policing, racism, and a rigged system could have come from most countries, and feels as ageless as the gritty, dirty cop thrillers from half a century ago, such as Serpico or Dirty Harry. It’s a film that’s simultaneously of the moment and of any moment, as the topical slides into the timeless.

The great Oleg Mutu’s cinematography is more subtle than in the sublime and highly choreographed camera movements of Miracle, but are no less beautiful and meaningful. Frequently incorporating a God’s eye view, filming the roving cars and endless mountains from above, Mutu and Apetri almost film Unidentified as a cosmic tragedy, something which also creates a universality to the film. They create occasionally unbearable tension by refusing to cut away from Floran as he embarks on his suspicious quest, stringing together long sequences which study the man with unblinking intensity.

Unidentified is the Dark Crime Masterpiece You Can Watch Now

While it’s not at all essential to see one in order to understand the other, it’s undoubtedly significant to watch Unidentified in relation to Miracle. Now audiences are able to with the release of Unidentified, and Film Movement has included deleted scenes and an invaluable commentary track from the fascinating Apetri (a late bloomer he began his professional life studying criminal law before teaching cinema in New York and directing his own movies).

Apetri is a wonderful speaker, and re-watching Unidentified, which is already a movie that should be seen twice, with his commentary is a joy. The film is now available on DVD and digital, and would make the perfect holiday gift for any cinephile.