Venice 2026 Review: NO PARADISE IF YOU ARE KILLED BY A WOMAN Goes into Stealth Mode to Confront the Scars of War

Norway-based, Iraqi-born filmmaker Halkawt Mustafa goes into stealth mode in his latest work, provocatively titled No Paradise If You Are Killed by a Woman.

The woman in the title is Vyan (Avan Jamal), a Kurdish sniper introduced through an intense series of action sequences: Infiltrating an enemy-held building, taking out terrorists during an air strike, and facing an armour-plated truck loaded with explosives in a nerve-racking stand-off.

Vyan is granted asylum in Norway, the film is an Iraqi-Norwegian co-production, where she contemplates accepting the government’s offer of a new identity. Her family has been torn apart by ISIS, and she herself was sold into slavery.

As intense PTSD flashbacks begin to resurface, she receives a phone call indicating that her younger sister Helin, who was also sold into slavery and presumed dead, is still alive in Mosul. With nothing left to lose, Vyan returns to action despite the hefty bounty on her head, embarking on a tightly engineered rescue mission.

No Paradise If You Are Killed by a Woman is built on the familiar mechanics of the classical stealth-combat thriller, enhanced by the flair and aestheticisation of war associated with first-person shooter games. Vyan surveys positions, moves through tunnels and bombed-out buildings, improvises concealment, and waits for the precise moment to fire.

While Mustafa integrates Vyan’s trauma and her determination to save the only remaining member of her family into her fearless infiltration of enemy territory, No Paradise If You Are Killed by a Woman remains a straightforward action film governed by thriller conventions: Its protagonist must enter hostile territory without being detected, even as Vyan is framed in the mythic mode of the solitary avenger. Mustafa intends the film as a tribute to the Kurdish women who fought ISIS, drawing inspiration from the fighters he encountered while working as a war photographer in 2014.

The action becomes intense through precise staging and timing, yet the film does not overlook the destruction surrounding it. Shot in Mosul, it carries an authentic sense of place, with rubble, exposed interiors, destroyed buildings, and architectural scars embedded throughout the urban environment.

Cinematographer John Erling Holmenes Fredriksen finds a harsh tactility in these settings without allowing them to dissolve entirely into picturesque devastation. The result is also a painful reminder of the sheer extent of the destruction.

No Paradise If You Are Killed by a Woman features action choreographed for cinematic spectacle, at times recalling the golden age of action cinema in the 1980s and 1990s. However, Mustafa largely avoids falling into the trap of fetishising violence. Despite the artistic licence taken for the purposes of genre spectacle, the film remains grounded in the reality that women did fight ISIS within the masculine and unforgiving environment of war.

Moreover, the director supplies distressing reminders that prevent the violence from becoming banal or slipping into the glorification of ultraviolence familiar from some video games. Families are not only torn apart; civilians are killed while attempting to flee, and the film includes harrowing scenes of children being harmed or killed in a conflict they did not choose.

As Vyan becomes the spectre haunting the enemy lines, these images of children caught in combat restore a sobering truth about armed conflict in general, not only the siege of Mosul depicted in Mustafa’s film.