No Paradise If You Are Killed By A Woman (2026) Movie Drinking Game
Take a Drink: whenever an ISIS combatant loses his shot at paradise
Take a Drink: whenever Vyan asks someone about her sister
Take a Drink: for dehumanization and slavery
Take a Drink: whenever someone mentions the Peshmerga
Do a Shot: for comeuppances
By: Henry J. Fromage (Two Beers) –
Now that there’s a title, ain’t it? Usually I write up more of an intro, but today we’re going to bask in the glory of that title.
No Paradise If You Are Killed By A Woman follows Vyan, a female Kurdish sniper who enters Mosul in search of her sister, who’s been missing since an ISIS attack years before.
A Toast
If there was any justice in Hollywood, or still the sort of cross-cultural jingoism that fueled Rambo’s adventure in Afghanistan (that’s aged well), there would be many films about the brave fight of the Kurds against ISIS. Their female units are particularly fascinating- they’ve existed since the 1990s in the armed forces of the Kurdish Regional Government in Iraq- the Peshmerga (Iraqi federal regions are responsible for raising and maintaining their own defense forces).
Director Halkawt Mustafa begins his film with a long, tense opening shot of Vyan traversing a bombed out courtyard and complex that may have formerly been a monastery considering the crosses we see on walls. She finds and kills a sniper and frees his young female hostage, but she’s not the sister she’s been looking for- just an initial clue. A firefight ensues in which her cold competency as a sniper herself is amply established.
Mustafa sketches out her motivations and past just as efficiently. Her family were immigrants to Norway, but when they decide to visit their homeland, they’re ambushed in the 2014 ISIS invasion of Iraq, resulting in her mother and father being shot and her sister and her being sold into slavery. He doesn’t skimp on the horrors of being an ISIS bride- caged like animals, beaten into submission at any sign of resistance. She has no shortage of motivation, that’s for sure.
As Vyan hones in on the Swedish Sniper who she heard has her sister, the film becomes almost procedural as we witness her carve a sniper’s hole through a wall throughout the night, or scan and triangulate distances and potential target with maps and drawings, or locate and take out a competing sniper. The climax just builds and builds in terrible force as she puts all these skills to work navigating a three-sniper death zone for civilians and combatants alike, and finally the apex sniper she’s been after this whole time.
Beer Two
While it’s obviously not the focus, her escape from ISIS territory after shooting her abusive so called husband/captor, probably would have made for an entire film in and of itself. It would have been nice to have gotten a bit more detail on that part of her story.
Verdict
No Paradise If You Are Killed By A Woman is a crackling action film with real thematic and dramatic heft.
