No Good Men: Honest Review — Is It Worth Watching? | 0.0/10

No Good Men is a deceptively light romantic comedy wrapped around the weight of a collapsing nation, and it lands harder than you’d expect because it refuses to shout about what it’s really about. Sadat has made something genuinely rare: a film that could make you laugh at a joke about a cheating husband one minute and break your heart the next, all while the Taliban is literally closing in on the city’s borders.

No Good Men: The plot (no spoilers)

No Good Men follows Naru, a single mother and the only female camerawoman at Kabul’s main TV station, as she navigates custody battles and romantic skepticism while her country collapses in real time. The setup sounds like a conventional rom-com—burnt woman meets charming man, sparks fly, audiences swoon—but the film treats this formula like a house built on quicksand, where every small domestic moment is shadowed by geopolitical catastrophe. Sadat uses the romance as a Trojan horse for something much darker and more urgent.

The movie’s set in August 2021, those final weeks before the Taliban’s swift return to power, and that temporal specificity is everything. The film never becomes a political thriller or a war drama; instead, it stays laser-focused on Naru’s interior life, her professional ambitions, and her tentative connection with Qodrat, played by Anwar Hashimi. The tone is deliberately uneven—jokes land, then the camera catches a glimpse of armed men in the street, and suddenly the comedy feels like a coping mechanism rather than the point.

Acting & direction

Shahrbanoo Sadat (who also directs) inhabits Naru with a specificity that’s almost anthropological; she doesn’t play likability, she plays survival, and there’s something much more magnetic about watching a woman operate from that frequency. Anwar Hashimi as Qodrat could’ve been a stock dreamboat, but he’s given real interiority—he’s not rescuing Naru, he’s simply present, and the film understands that presence itself is revolutionary in a country about to lose its freedom.

Sadat’s directorial sensibility is restrained and observational; she frames Kabul like a character with its own mood swings, and the cinematography captures the city’s final days of cosmopolitanism with an almost elegiac quality. The score doesn’t manipulate, it underscores, and the pacing resists sentiment—scenes breathe, conversations sprawl, and the film trusts you to feel the stakes without being beaten over the head with them.

The strengths

• The refusal to make this a political sermon disguised as entertainment; instead, Sadat lets the political tragedy exist in the margins, which somehow makes it more devastating.
• Naru’s characterization as a woman skeptical of love because she’s seen what men are capable of in her own life—the personal and political collapse feel genuinely connected, not forced.
• A third act that doesn’t tie things up neatly, leaving you to wrestle with whether romance even matters when your nation is disappearing, which is a ballsy move for a romantic comedy.

The weaknesses

• The tonal balance occasionally tips toward whimsy when the stakes demand more gravity, and a few early comedic beats feel like safety nets the film doesn’t actually need.
• Some of the supporting characters remain sketchy, existing more as obstacles than fully realized people, which dilutes the ensemble’s potential.

Who should watch it

This film is for anyone tired of romantic comedies that demand nothing from you intellectually or emotionally, people who loved the intimacy and wit of Before trilogy-style character dramas, and viewers interested in how cinema from the Global South is telling stories we in the West rarely get to see. You don’t need to be obsessed with Afghan cinema to connect with it; you just need to be willing to sit with ambiguity and let a film whisper instead of shouting.

Final verdict

No Good Men is a film that knows exactly what it’s doing, even when it appears to be doing something lighter than what’s actually happening beneath the surface. Sadat has made something that feels urgent without being didactic, romantic without being sentimental, and hopeful without being naive about the future. It’s not perfect—some scenes meander when they should breathe—but it’s the kind of film that gets better in your memory than it was in the moment, which is the highest compliment I can pay to a work of cinema.