No Paradise if You Are Killed by a Woman – first-look review

Every bit as evocative as its lengthy title, No Paradise If You Are Killed By A Woman is a vertiginous descent into hell. Halkawt Mustafa’s third fiction feature even rises from pitch blackness, with the camera gliding through a cracked-open wall to lock its sights on Vyan (Avan Jamal). The Peshmerga sniper sneaks into Mosul to flush the occupiers out of the northern Iraqi city. Her main target: a ruthless ISIS fighter nicknamed the ​“Swedish Sniper”, who has forced Vyan’s sister into wedlock while laying constant aim on the terrorized city. 

It’s 2016, two years after ISIS turned Iraq’s second-largest city into a ruinous open-air prison, during a war that displaced close to a million people and claimed over 10,000 civilian lives. The few survivors still daring to escape this urban war zone are easy targets for the countless hidden snipers like the one Vyan is hunting, cynically instructed to shoot anything that moves. It’s these bombarded buildings and body-riddled streets that now set the stage for a taut revenge thriller, centred on a premise rarely explored with such cinematic vigour and emotional heft.

A Kurdish writer-director based in Norway, Mustafa filmed this spectacular war film on location in Mosul, endowing the calculated imagery of cinematographer John-Erling Holmenes Fredriksen with the kind of documentary veracity many filmmakers can only dream of. The urgency of the mise-en-scène is amplified even further through a physically demanding and emotionally devastating performance by rising star Avan Jamal. Already excelling in gorgeously choreographed long-range combat and close-distance skirmishes, her Vyan mostly shines as a beacon of light amidst these murky ruins, offering a relatable human face in abject subhuman conditions. 

As if lifted from Denis Villeneuve’s Sicario or Hideo Kojima’s Metal Gear Solid video game series, the heroine prowls this war zone with a silenced pistol in hand and an enormous sniper rifle strapped to her back, racking up an impressive kill count over the course of the film’s runtime – later on, she confesses that more than a hundred ISIS fighters have perished at the other end of her barrel.

A chance encounter between Mustafa and a female Peshmerga sniper at the onset of the siege became the inspiration for Vyan. While the film refrains from too overt valorisation of battle-hardened soldiers, it does a remarkable job of honouring the bravery of the female Peshmerga fighters who helped liberate northern Iraq from the ISIS caliphate. Even more powerful is how No Paradise rectifies the exploitation of the Yazidi, an ethnic minority that saw thousands of its women kidnapped, killed or sold into sexual slavery by the occupying forces. Through a brutal flashback, we learn this to be Vyan’s origin story, instantly justifying the extremes she goes to in order to free her sister from a fate worse than death.

The result is the rare war film that deserves its gratifying action scenes, as Vyan’s rifle aims for genuine emancipation. No Paradise poignantly distances itself from the many earlier Middle East – set war spectacles that prioritise the perspective of American soldiers, often depicted as both perpetrators and self-appointed victims in their war on terror – or whatever you might call America’s imperial travesties in the Arab world. Mustafa’s film thus rests on a double reversal of representation: foregrounding a feminist narrative that stems from a cinematically underserved ethnic minority. With Hiding Saddam Hussein, he already proved he could make a surprisingly tender documentary about the simple farmer who hid the fallen Iraqi dictator under a bed of flowers. No Paradise now solidifies his status as a major director, one who has made a painfully beautiful film about one of the most sinister conflicts of our era.