Denmark is hoping to repeat its previous success at the 99th Academy Awards (or Oscars as they’re commonly known), an awards ceremony celebrating the best of cinema in 2026.
The Danish Oscar Committee, a body coordinated by the Danish Film Institute, has selected Woman Unknown (Kvinde Ukendt) as its official submission to the ‘best international feature film’ category.
Woman Unknown is a co-production between Denmark, Sweden, and Latvia, and drew headlines in September when it won the prestigious Golden Lion award at the Venice Film Festival.
Post-WWII sexual shame
The film is set in Copenhagen in the immediate aftermath of Denmark’s liberation from Nazi Germany. Marie (played by Mathilde Arcel) is a housekeeper about to marry her employer (played by Carsten Bjørnlund), however she hides a secret: a past intimate relationship she had with a German soldier.
It is directed by Danish-Egyptian director May el-Toukhy whose previous film Queen of Hearts was also submitted to the Oscars, but did not secure a nomination. She has also directed several episodes of the Netflix drama The Crown.
It premiered at Venice Film Festival, where aside from the Golden Lion, it also took home the Volpi Cup for best leading actress. It has not yet premiered in Denmark, first set to do so in February 2027.
‘Painful’, ‘provocative’, and ‘harrowing’
Reviews for the film out of Venice were quite positive, but not overwhelming. They emphasised the discomfort caused by el-Toukhy’s direction and Arcel’s performance.
The Guardian’s review gave the film four out of five stars calling it “an elegantly appointed drama-thriller with something of Alfred Hitchcock’s Rebecca”.
Indiewire’s review gave the film a ‘B+’ rating, and Variety called the film, “a provocative but predictable psychodrama”.
In a generally negative review, Sight and Sound criticised the film for, “having little beneath the surface level” and for the two dimensionalness of the character of Marie.
However, review aggregates still give the film very solidly positive scores, with a 94% on Rotten Tomatoes and a 84 on Metacritic.
Denmark’s Oscar choice
When the Danish Oscar Committee met to select their submission last Friday, they had three films to choose from: Woman Unknown, the recently released What Lies Between Us (Dobbeltfejl), and the drama-film Home (Hjem).
Had the Committee not selected Woman Unknown it would still have automatically qualified for contention due to new rules and its win at Venice. However, that would have made the campaigning process messy and difficult from Danish side.
The prestigious awards the film has already won will help it, though Oscar prediction sites vary significantly in their analyses about its chances.
The Next Best Picture’s aggregate list only ranks it as the tenth likeliest contender (only the top five are nominated), while Variety predicts Woman Unknown will be one of the five nominees.
Four Oscar wins before
Denmark has had a fairly good track record when it comes to taking home Academy Awards.
Altogether, the country has won the ‘international feature’ category four times, most recently with the Thomas Vinterberg comedy-drama Another Round (Druk).
The country has been nominated an additional eleven times, most recently for the very dark psychological horror film The Girl with the Needle (Pigen med Nålen) loosely depicting the story of real-life serial killer Dagmar Overbye.
We won’t know if Woman Unknown will bolster these numbers for quite a while. Nominees are announced in January 2027 and the winners’ ceremony takes place in March 2027.
