American poet Walt Whitman  wrote in his poem  Song of Myself: “I contradict myself; I am large…I contain multitudes”. In a similar tone, Fernando Pessoa responds to Descartes' “Cogito, ergo sum” by writing “Be what I am? But I think of being so many things". The heroine of Matija Gluščević and Dušan Zorić's debut film faces similar existential doubts. Have You Seen This Woman? goes a step further and wonders what happens when this multitude of identities is left unrealised and, as such, remains trapped in the armour of imposed social roles of a woman.

In an attempt to answer all these unlived identities that a woman carries within her, the film found itself both stylistically and thematically in the neglected expanses of domestic cinema. Aiming for genre ambiguity, the film creates an atmosphere that sometimes invokes a surrealist thriller and sometimes a dystopian drama. As a result of this dramaturgical choice, Have You Seen This Woman? exists inside its own ecosystem of meaning, yet the hermeticity of its symbols is permeable enough for the viewer to access.

The character of Draginja (Ksenija Marinković) paints a portrait  of a woman, but also  of an indifferent society in which she invisibly exists. In the film, the stealthy gaze of the public service broadcaster (literally) shows the irony of vigilant observation of the value system, as well as the political system - which remains blind to those who do not fit in. In a similar vein, the patriarchal society, embodied in the film as the silent observers who accept it and its values by their very silence, forgets about all the women accomplished in their roles as mothers and wives. In this case, the equation is simple. Cogito, ergo sum. Mater sum, ergo sum. The children have grown up and I have lost my role as a mother, ergo… I do not exist.

All those sacrificed, unrealised aspects of identity in the selected scenes begin to whisper Draginja's name, calling her to wake up, and she follows the trail of that voice in order to discover the uninhabited territories of her personality. Thus, in a somewhat Kieślowskian way, across the three acts Draginja explores the paths she never took. In almost all of his films, in one way or another the Polish director explored the question of fate and the forces that take the individual down one path or another. In this sense, however, the closest such parallel is Blind Chance, in which Kieślowski somewhat more subtly (and successfully) than the Serbian duo observes the three possible outcomes for his hero. In  Have You Seen This Woman? there is a search for somewhat similar answers, but the search takes place from  a certain affective distance. Not daring (or not wanting) to get close enough to its heroine, the film deprives the viewer of a better understanding of Draginja's decisions and thus the basis for emotional identification. Given such a pronounced individual focus on a single woman, one might expect that this perspective would intimately acquaint us with the emotional content of the existential crisis she is going through. The film boldly aims for a closer look at the experiential in a woman, but ends with an inadequately formed assumption of the same, again confronting us with an attempt to recount a woman's issue from a position that is actually foreign to her. In the given thematic set-up, the question of whether we have seen these women - though no less important - remains only a superficial aspect of the problem that the film wants to address. Have You Seen This Woman? recognizes the urgency of the issue it tackles, but forgets that the core problem is not so much the visibility but whether all these women can also be heard. The film shows that Draginja and the women she represents really exist, but lacks artistic insight into what they are thinking, which is certainly an indispensable aspect of understanding and, consequently, recognition.