The Unknown: A Search for Identity in Another Body
When we look at a photograph, do we truly long for the past, or do we create something new in the past to long for because we are dissatisfied with the present? Arthur Harari’s “The Unknown” revolves around this question from its very first moments. David’s search for the present-day counterparts of the Parisian and suburban locations he photographed in the past brings together, within the same frame, the things time has changed and the things it has left unchanged.
When a photograph taken years ago is placed side by side with today’s image, the location often remains surprisingly intact; only the people, signs, vehicles, and motifs of another time have been added to its surroundings. Yet when a person looks at an old photograph, what they see is never just the location. The question, “Was I happier back then?” seeps from the photograph into the present. It is impossible to know the answer; for the photograph offers not so much proof of our past happiness as a frozen image through which we can imbue the past with meaning during times when we cannot make sense of our present. People, however, are not like that; they transform into a different being as they move from the past to the present.
This is, in part, David’s dilemma. He is a man who can no longer fully know how much he belongs to a place, a time, or even his own life. While trying to interpret life’s uncertainty through photography, he encounters Eva. He does not recognize her; he knows nothing of her past, her thoughts, or her life. Yet he sees in her face a profound unhappiness that promises so much. It is as if his own unhappiness has merged with that of this stranger.
Sometimes a person desires not the person standing before them, but the possibilities created by knowing nothing about them. David, as a man who has been marginalized and whose potential to be desired is steadily diminishing, falls prey to the deceptive allure of mystery. The unknown nature of another person is more exciting than the emptiness of his own life, which he knows all too well. “The Unknown” begins to take shape precisely here: even before there were people who could change bodies, David had already begun to ascribe meaning to another person as a way to escape himself.
The Contagious Nature of Emptiness
To view the unknown creature in “The Unknown” merely as a fantastical organism that travels from body to body is to grossly underestimate the world the film creates. What Harari has created is the embodiment of humanity’s inner fear of annihilation. Moreover, this state of mind is transmitted from person to person through sex. When a person is with someone new, they might think they’ll be happy — or at the very least, that by the end of the night, they’ll be free from their loneliness for a few hours.
Part of what makes one-night stands appealing is the freedom from thinking about the consequences. If a person feels they don’t belong anywhere, they might think discovering someone new will do them good. But if their expectations aren’t met by morning, their state of mind can worsen even further. “The Unknown” transforms this feeling into a fantastical mechanism, turning it not into a vehicle for sexual intimacy, but into a conduit through which emptiness passes from one person to another.
The film’s mathematics of body transfer also begins to unfold ingeniously from this point on. After the orgasm, the first thing David does upon waking up in Eva’s body is to examine his new body. He begins to examine his genitals, breasts, and teeth in his new body; he sets out to rediscover himself, much like a tourist who has arrived in a country he has never visited before. While this may seem at first glance like a comical extension of male curiosity, it holds a more fundamental meaning for David.
His life has become so mundane that the transfer into another person’s body reignites his sense of curiosity. This transformation becomes a kind of journey for him, and perhaps that is why adapting to his new situation proves easier than expected. Malia’s experience, however, is the exact opposite. When the young woman finds herself in the body of a forty-year-old man, she sees not a new landscape to explore, but a foreign shell in which she is trapped. She is so repulsed by her body that she won’t even take a shower to avoid seeing it. For Malia, this situation becomes a sense of occupation that feels almost equivalent to being abused.
The Illusion That Youth Will Never End
Malia’s experiences lie at the heart of the film’s exploration of the passage of time. When we’re young, we know that youth will one day end, but we don’t truly believe it. Growing old is, in theory, something that will happen to us, but in practice, it’s always the problem of someone else in the distant future. In this context, the fact that aging nearly twenty years in a single night affects Malia the most is equivalent to a young person’s reaction.
A young woman who sees the concert she attends on the eve of her wedding as one of her last bastions of freedom loses not only her body but also the years she assumed she had ahead of her within just a few hours. While seeking to live the “now” offered by a one-night stand, the fact that she consumes her entire future is like a reflection of a nightmare. Once again, people think that time belongs to them when they are young. Malia, however, is forced to learn the hard way that time never truly belongs to her.
Ironically, the fact that the film is considered “boring” — especially by young viewers — may itself reflect a version of Malia’s own experience. Rather than turning the body’s transformation into a fast-paced cinematic trick, Harari constructs his story within a slow-burn narrative. He asks the audience to be patient, to piece together the details, and to wander for a while within the characters’ inner voids. However, for young viewers in the age of the cell phone — who are accustomed to consuming images in a matter of seconds — this waiting can naturally be challenging.
Get Haktan Kaan Icel’s stories in your inbox
Join Medium for free to get updates from this writer.
In this context, a mature perspective is required to grasp some of the emotions reflected in “The Unknown”. There is a strange, unintended parallel between a viewer who believes their youth will never end — and thus struggles to comprehend the weight of the twenty years Malia has lost — and Malia’s own inability to believe that those years could truly be lost. The fact that a viewer preoccupied with time while watching the film is, in fact, watching a film that tells the story of time being taken away makes “The Unknown” even more ironic.
Being Yourself in the Eyes of Others
The fact that Harari does not view the body swap merely as physical alienation makes the film’s exploration of identity even more intriguing. The woman Eva encounters while David — trapped in her body — is trying to reach out to others who have had the same experience is the most striking example of this. Having been treated as crazy and schizophrenic for years because she spoke about what had happened to her, the woman eventually believes she has found peace by accepting the identity society has imposed on her. However, the neurotic unease on her face suggests that this is less a genuine acceptance than a surrender to the struggle. For a person who doesn’t even know where her own body is, there is no other option left.
David’s reappearance, however, threatens the order she has established by reminding her of the old reality she had suppressed. Harari thus strips the question “Who am I?” of its romantic notion that a person can answer it on their own. Because identity is sustained, in part, by how others recognize us. A person may know who they are; but if no one from their family, social circle, or past can recognize them in the body before them, how long can they carry their own truth alone?
This is precisely where Malia’s tragedy deepens. In addition to losing her youth, she is forced to realize that her own life no longer belongs to her. At a certain point, Harari removes her from being a participant in her past and turns her into a spectator. This situation is directly related to the concept of the photograph at the beginning of the film. When a person looks at an old photograph, they know that the person in it is themselves, but they are no longer that person.
Malia, however, is experiencing a far more brutal and physical version of this. Moreover, when a person loses all the social markers of their identity, they want to return to their most fundamental sense of belonging: their family. But even if someone knows you better than anyone else, that doesn’t mean they’ll recognize you while you’re in someone else’s body. Thus, Malia’s delusion that youth will never end gradually merges with the delusion that a person can return to their past life whenever they want.
A Journey Without a Return Ticket
Another reflection of the film’s relationship with sex is the sense of “irreversibility.” Sexuality, which initially serves as a path to finding happiness within another person, gradually becomes the only possibility of returning to one’s lost self. In fact, Harari takes this idea to a point that is as absurd and existentially ironic as David having sex with his own body.
The man who seeks himself in another person ultimately comes face to face with himself in the truest sense of the word; yet even this encounter is not enough to restore him to his former self. For a person cannot reach the self they left behind by walking the same path in reverse. Sex may facilitate a transition into another body, but it renders the path back invalid. Just as with the locations David photographs, reaching the same spot again does not mean returning to the same moment in time.
Toward the end of the film, Harari’s focus begins to shift for this very reason. The issue is no longer merely the question, “Who am I?” We witness a transformation that evolves into the question, “What remains of my former self?” When a person loses their face, their body, their past, and the image others recognize, they may cling to even the smallest remnant of themselves to avoid complete annihilation.
The shift in David’s journey — from searching for himself in others to protecting what remains of himself — creates an unexpected impulse for life within the film’s darkness. David, who initially believed he could create happiness by combining two separate forms of unhappiness, is ultimately forced to realize that happiness is not a mysterious object to be found in another body; this is the foundation of the film’s existentialist perspective.
The Sense of Acceptance Derived from Irreversibility
In “The Unknown”, Harari constructs the story of people who don’t know where they’re going with a highly deliberate narrative structure. David searches for meaning in the past, Eva tries to fill the void in her life through death, and Malia assumes that her future already belongs to her. The mistake all three make stems from believing that time and identity are fixed. This is precisely why the photograph appears at the beginning of the film: it freezes time and gives people the illusion that some things remain the same. Yet a person is not a photograph. Over time, they transform into someone else, and sometimes their attempt to return to their former self is as impossible as trying to step into a photograph taken in the past.
For this reason, it is possible to contrast the wind blowing at the end with the photograph at the beginning of the film. While the photograph tries to keep the past in place, the wind does not allow anything to remain where it is. We do not know whether Harari’s wind blows as a divine touch blessing the new role God has assigned to David, or simply as an ordinary natural phenomenon showing that life goes on. After all, the whole point of “The Unknown” regarding the unknown is less about providing answers and more about what a person does in the face of uncertainty. David’s realization that he can no longer return to the past allows him to truly see the long road ahead for the first time. Sometimes, a person continues to live not by rediscovering who they are, but by accepting that they can no longer be the person they once were.
“The Unknown” is a film that shows how a person’s constant effort to fill the voids in their life with other possibilities can, at a certain point, create new voids. The mystery of a stranger, the excitement of a one-night stand, our belief that we were happier in the past, or our confidence that we will live a different life in the future… All of these are nothing more than small escape routes that people create to distance themselves from their current reality. The power of Harari’s fantastical idea lies in his ability to take this escape out of the realm of metaphor and make it physical.
Harari creates a film that is difficult to grasp because he does not attempt to establish an easy balance by pitting victory against loss or happiness against unhappiness. A person can only gauge their own worth when they have lost everything about themselves; for often, we cannot understand the place our possessions hold in our lives until we lose them. Perhaps this is why, when a person realizes they can no longer return to the past, they truly begin to long for it. “The Unknown”, on the other hand, reminds us that learning to live with what remains of oneself — rather than finding oneself — can be far more difficult.
