The Unknown Woman, directed by Giuseppe Tornatore who returns to the helm for this suspenseful thriller concerning a young Ukrainian prostitute-turned-cleaning woman named Irina (Kseniya Rappoport).  Years ago, Irina was bought into international prostitution.  Through the flashbacks throughout the movie, I can tell that Irina has been brutalized, physically, and mentally abused by her “pimp.”  Irina was forced to bearing nine children, each which was taken away from her at birth and put up for adoption.  This starts Irina’s journey to finding her youngest child, whom she believes she knows who her new family is and he plans to go in and get her back.  She is determined to find a job in an elegant apartment building doing cleaning duties in order to work her way closer to a family that resides in that building.   

hough her appearance would suggest poverty, Irina always has a good-sized wad of cash in her pocket and lives in a large apartment across the street from the loudly dysfunctional Adacher family.  She befriends the nanny of the child, Thea, in order to get in closer with the family.  When the nanny suddenly becomes injured, purposely by Irina, but she made it appear as an accident, the Adacher family offers her the job to replace the nanny, Gina.  While working for the family, Irina comes across adoption documents.  Now she is just so sure that Thea is indeed her child.  Thea’s adopted mom becomes suspicious of Irina and she fires her, despite the fact that Irina and Thea have built such a close relationship. 

            Without a job now, Irina is beaten up on her walk home by a bunch of thugs who she believed were hired by pimp, whom stalked her.  He rigs the car of Thea’s mother, and forces a car accident which results in the mother’s death.  He then tries to get Irina to take him to the place where he believed she stored all of his money.  However, during a struggle the pimp falls and is killed by hitting his head on a rock.  Meanwhile, Thea’s father moves into a new apartment and prepares a room for Irina for her to stay in however, during the police investigation of Thea’s real mother, Irina is taken into custody and arrested. 

In the end, it turns out that Thea, was not Irina’s daughter but despite their close relationship, Thea awaits Irina when she gets out of jail.  The theme of the movie is never give up hope. In the film Irena went out looking for her daughter  and didn’t stop until she found her. Although Thea was not Irena’s daughter they both find a mother daughter relationship within one another. In conclusion, this was a very good movie. On a scale of 1 to 5 I would give this movie a 4. The story in this film is truly unique from other movies that I have seen.