Mosul
Matthew Michael Carnahan, 2019
First, make sure you find the right Mosul.
There are several films with that title, including a documentary. The one you want is the 2019 Arabic-language narrative feature written and directed by Matthew Michael Carnahan, produced by the Russo brothers.
Credit: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt9252468/?ref_=nv_sr_srsg_0_tt_6_nm_2_in_0_q_mosul%20
There are war films that trade in spectacle and there are war films that drag you into the moral mud and refuse to let you wash. Mosul is firmly in the latter camp - and is exceptional because of it.
From the opening moments, the film doesn’t ‘build’ tension in the traditional sense. It simply drops you into chaos mid-firefight, and from there never really loosens its grip. Carnahan structures the story as a relentless forward drive through a shattered city, punctuated only by brief lulls - moments that feel less like relief and more like men catching breath before another moral compromise. Critics have noted how its pacing favours sustained urgency rather than neat dramatic peaks and valleys.
What makes the film genuinely gripping is not just the combat realism - though that is ferocious - but the dirty complexity of survival politics. Every encounter carries the question:
Who is loyal?
Who is compromised?
Who is simply trying to live another hour?
This sense of shifting allegiance is rooted in the story’s inspiration. The screenplay grew out of journalist Luke Mogelson’s reporting on Iraqi fighters battling ISIS, originally published in The New Yorker, grounding the narrative in lived experience rather than Hollywood mythology. And as a story, it’s so much more complex than the bog-standard goodie vs baddie, or gung-ho bore of US war fodder.
Carnahan himself is an interesting figure to track. Before making his directorial debut here, he built a career writing politically inflected thrillers such as The Kingdom, Deepwater Horizon, and Dark Waters - films that explore institutional power, moral compromise and the cost of action.
In Mosul, he finally takes full authorship of those themes - and the result feels personal, almost stripped of conventional genre safety nets.
The narrative unfolds like a mission that keeps mutating in meaning. Initially it appears to be a standard last-patrol survival story, but as the plot unwraps, the film reveals itself as something deeper:
A meditation on honour, masculinity, and the emotional contracts between men who fight together.
Not heroic masculinity in the mythic sense - but masculinity forged in shared trauma, silent codes, and the stubborn insistence on protecting family even when civilisation itself has collapsed.
Visually and tonally, the film achieves something rare. It sustains a documentary-level immediacy in real-time, while still functioning as muscular narrative cinema. Cities are not mere backdrops - they are psychological landscapes. Iraq’s second city Mosul becomes a maze of memory, grief, and unfinished business. The destruction is not just physical; it’s moral terrain.
Perhaps most striking is how the film reduces warfare to ethical micro-decisions, embracing the true complexities. Not grand strategy. Not ideology.
Just the raw calculus of:
Do I pull the trigger?
Do I trust this man?
Do I keep moving forward ~ and if so, how?
And this is where Mosul finds its brilliance. It understands that war, stripped of rhetoric, is ultimately about personal courage - most often exercised in silence, so often misunderstood and very rarely rewarded. A really adult film. (In the non-porno sense).
Terrific performances throughout, you never fail to believe these characters are who they purport to be, it also simply drives.
The momentum is relentless, the storytelling lean, the emotional payoffs delayed until the last possible second. By the time the film reveals the true nature of the squad’s mission, the narrative click is both devastating and utterly humane.
If you’re interested in war cinema that avoids Western saviour framing and instead centres local experience, this is essential viewing. It also has the Best ending…
Again - make sure you find the right one - rare perhaps for my choices, but this one is currently available on the Flix.
Already announced in a couple of spots, but I’m planning to make my third feature, shoot planned for August. If anyone’s interested. Wish me luck.
Anatomy of a Flop 068
