‘No Paradise If You Are Killed By A Woman’ review: Tense, blunt-edged Kurdish war thriller follows a female sniper in Iraq

Dir. Halkawt Mustafa. Norway/Iraqi. 2026. 110 mins. 

Genre razzle-dazzle can be an effective way to alert audiences to the realities of the world’s conflict zones. In that sense, feminist-themed war thriller No Paradise If You Are Killed By A Woman clearly gets its message across about the brutalities of Islamic State rule in Kurdistan, and the role played by women in the Peshmerga forces that resisted it. This drama from Norwegian-Kurdish writer-director Halkawt Mustafa, following 2023’s Hiding Saddam Hussein, can boast vividly orchestrated combat sequences and a charismatically terse lead performance by Avan Jamal; but it ultimately comes across rather blunt, laced with emphatically meaningful rhetorical flourishes.

Presented with a glossy action-movie stylisation that undercuts nuance 

Premiering out of competition in Venice, No Paradise… should certainly secure accessible festival slots, but never feels sufficiently subtle or individual to attract more specialist art-house sensibilities – although its submission as Iraq’s official Academy Awards entry should boost its profile. 

The film begins in 2016 near Mosul in northern Iraq, with a virtuoso extended shot that snakes through a hole in a wall to follow a tense, heavily armed young woman through war-blasted city streets and into a wrecked church, where she rescues a young captive woman. Vyan (Avan Jamal), explains that she is a fighter with the Peshmerga, the military forces of Iraqi Kurdistan, and that she is searching for her younger sister Helin, said to be in the hands of an IS man known as the ‘Swedish Sniper’. A flashback to 2014 shows how Vyan’s family, visiting Iraq from their home in Norway, were stranded when IS advanced through the region, the sisters taken captive and the parents killed. 

Later Vyan escaped, joining a Peshmerga unit under female officer Kanar (Kanar Sarchl) and becoming a highly skilled, fiercely focused sniper. She later returns to Norway, where security officer Anders (Thorbjørn Harr) warns her that has put a million-dollar bounty on her head. Norway has offered her safety and a new identity, but Vyan is soon back in Iraq and on her sister’s trail.  

What follows makes expertly choreographed, tactically canny use of rooftops, bombed-out buildings and devastated cityscapes, as Vyan – supported by an avuncular old Kurdish general (Kader Jalal) – pursues her mission on the Mosul front. The final act is efficiently suspenseful, but overall there is a disconnect between the harshness of the war scenario, with its brutal depiction of IS ruthlessness, and the sometimes jarring glamour of the presentation of its heroine. 

Jamal’s deadpan demeanour and somewhat impassive delivery deepen the impression of a woman who is emotionally scarred and radically transformed by the hell she has endured. Even so, the film awkwardly skips a beat by offering little sense of the training that transforms Vyan from hapless outsider to implacable guerrilla – as if trauma alone were sufficient to make a super-soldier. The film rather over-stresses Jamal’s striking looks; framed in a repertoire of gun-toting kick-ass (or kick-ISIS) poses, she is presented with a glossy action-movie stylisation that undercuts the nuance in her character.  

The film also suffers from being excessively tricksy with its first-half’s structure, zigzagging between Kurdistan and Norway, with flashbacks showing Vyan’s capture and her ordeal as a brutal man’s purchased chattel. The dialogue, mainly Kurdish, is over-egged, at least in the English subtitles, both in its war-movie clichés (“Don’t be crazy, you’ll never make it!”) and in Vyan’s sincere professions of faith, sometimes in voice-over (“Only when we face death do we understand the value of life”). Trond Bjerknes’s score, including Eastern instruments like the oud and duduk, plus a plangent solo female voice, further stresses the poignancy. 

But the action sequences, punctuated by tension-inducing gun viewfinder shots, are delivered with dynamic precision. DoP John Erling H. Fredriksen makes the most of Mosul locations and Mikael Varhelyi’s authentically distressed production design, shooting in atmospheric, dust-filled light that could make you cough just squinting through it.