Director – Nadia Fall – 2025 – UK – Cert. 15 – 93m
***
Two radicalised British, teenage girls run away from home intending to become brides for Islamic State – out in UK cinemas on Friday, September 26th
When they meet at the local school, Doe (Ebada Hassan) and Muna (Safiyya Ingar) strike up an unlikely friendship. In a way, they’re like chalk and cheese – Doe is the quiet one, always observing, while Muna is brash, loud and outgoing. Both come from Muslim backgrounds, and both feel alienated from their classmates, their school and wider British culture. Muna sticks up for herself against school bullies, and effectively gets vilified by the school authorities, and as a result her father, for doing so.
So, without their parents’ permission, they fly off to Turkey to meet up with a man who has groomed them online as brides for Islamic State. When their contact never shows up at the airport, they resolve to find their own way into Syria. As well as following their journey, the narrative frequently lapses into often confusing flashbacks about their home and school lives. And infuriatingly, it never explores how they fare when their their rose-tinted idealism collides with the harsh reality of becoming jihadist brides.
Ultimately this is a film asserting female independence, the spirit of girlhood, all that stuff. Which sounds of itself reasonable enough, indeed, a good thing, something the film goes some way to exploring This probably ticks all the left- and feminist-leaning, UK film-funding boxes, Yet it shows its two radicalised Muslim schoolgirls as ignorant of geopolitical reality (perhaps the vast majority of teenagers in the UK regardless of gender and ethnicity are like this) and worse, totally bereft of what one might call consensus Judeo-Christian / Muslim morality (witness the way Muna thinks nothing of stealing the wallet from the helpful lady employee from the Turkish bus terminal who has given them food and shelter for the night, helping them out of a jam.)
But where the film really fails is that it ends where I really wanted it to start: what happens when these children (which, despite all the talk about periods and womanhood is really what they are) come smack up against gun-toting, extremist Islamic State militia for whom they have chosen to be brides. We see therm walking towards a village with gunmen and that’s it. That, surely, would be the whole point of making the movie. That’s the second life-changing catharsis the film might be expected to tackle, but it never goes there.
A missed opportunity.
Brides is out in cinemas in the UK on Friday, September 26th.
Trailer: