Film Title: Attack on Paradise
Cast: Saïd Boumazoughe, Clara Cleymans, Achmed Akkabi, Jamal Ben Saddik, Imanuelle Grives
Director: Bob Colaers
Writers: Saïd Boumazoughe, Sven Huybrechts, Salahdine Ibnou Kacemi
Distribution: KFD (Belgium), Blue Finch Film Releasing (International)
Production: A Team Productions (BE), Aattache Films (NL)
Release Date: Belgian Theatrical: 23 September 2026 | World Premiere: 19 July 2026, Fantasia International Film Festival (Horizon section)
Watched at: Fantasia International Film Festival 2026
Review by: Mother of Movies covering in Australia
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This review covers Attack on Paradise without giving away the final floor. A clearly marked spoiler section sits below the rating for those who’ve already made it out of the building.
Also Known as “Paradise”
Sulyman walked out of prison into a neighbourhood that had reorganised itself around one man’s will. No gradual reintroduction to the world, just a building rebranded as Prince Hamza’s fortress while he was inside. Attack on Paradise, which premiered at Fantasia International Film Festival 2026, takes that specific dread, the world closing ranks without you, and turns it into a sharp action film with plenty of softness and gore in equal measure.
Saïd Boumazoughe plays Sulyman with a stillness that’s constantly threatening to fracture. He’s not a hero. He’s a man who can fight, who spent seven years locked up, and who genuinely doesn’t want to use that skill right now. His dad died while he was in prison. His brother got stabbed because he wasn’t there to protect him. His mum got evicted from the top floors by Prince Hamza, who’s turned the building into something between a criminal operation and a personal art installation. The film opens with Sulyman trying to navigate a homecoming that’s already hostile before the tactical raid even starts.
Each Floor Tells Its Own Story
Director Bob Colaers structures the film as a vertical descent through a building that works like a criminal ecosystem. Sulyman’s mission is to reunite with his mum while the building is under siege. Each level has its own visual language. There’s a green-lit sequence, that night-vision wash that makes ordinary people look like something you’d instinctively back away from.
Sulyman moves through a corridor of attackers that the film frames, as a zombie scene. Films like REC make it feel like there’s a secret nod to the horror films that made this technique popular. It’s one of the film’s visual mirrors along with other genre inspired imagery that I noticed, peppered into the Sulymans journey to save his mother.
After many many fights and where you would expect the film might be running on fumes, it finds another gear. A pole dancer. Pool table fights. The first song with actual lyrics on the soundtrack.
The score is genuinely smart throughout, it doesn’t reach for the obvious. It marks the moment Sulyman starts taking things personally, then tips into techno while the colour palette shifts into black light and neon. It feels like a rave that’s gone catastrophically wrong in the best way.
The cinematography doesn’t waste a frame. Low light, sound design doing the heavy lifting, and fight choreography that’s fast, messy, and brutal. Nothing is clean. Effects with precision. Nobody walks away from a round without paying for it.
Prince Hamza Doesn’t Need to Explain Himself
Achmed Akkabi’s Prince Hamza is frightening precisely because of what the film withholds. He’s introduced pruning bamboo in a room adjacent to someone he’s actively torturing. He watches the invasion of his building through surveillance feeds and responds with the detachment of someone managing logistics, not a crisis. By the time the film reaches the top floor, the gap between how he sees himself and what he actually is has become its own kind of horror.
Clara Cleymans plays Yasmine, the rookie cop who ends up the last officer standing. She starts the film dropping her daughter at school. She and Sulyman spend a darkly funny stretch of the middle act trying to convince each other they’re not enemies, a loop that echoes Sulyman’s original arrest, where a comb became a weapon and his mum’s pills became evidence. The film doesn’t underline the connection.
The dialogue, in Dutch and Arabic with subtitles, is stripped bare in a way that matches the environment. Nobody monologues. Nobody explains themselves. The emotional register is people trying to stay alive and occasionally saying something true in between. A Book of Job quote from the opening pays off smartly. A Dante’s Inferno reference from Yasmine does the same.
(The electric-in-waterbed kill is, for what it’s worth, genuinely inventive.)
Seven Years Is Long Enough
What separates Attack on Paradise from a standard building-crawler is how seriously it takes Sulyman’s absence from the world. Seven years is long enough for a building to become a kingdom. Long enough for your mum to need insulin you weren’t there to provide. The film keeps returning to this, not as backstory, but as the actual reason everything happens. He’s not trying to take down Prince Hamza. He’s trying to get to his mum’s unit and then subsequently trying to save her with the medicine she needs to survive. The fact that those two things become inseparable means it never stops being quietly sombre.
A Belgian-Dutch co-production built for exactly this kind of formally ambitious, genre-serious work, Attack on Paradise is the film that reminds you why festival action cinema exists separately from the multiplex version. It has sheep in it. I’m fairly sure they survive. That detail tells you what the film actually cares about.
Wrong Place. Wrong Time. Exactly Right.
Sulyman just wants his mum’s insulin and his stuff from the basement. That he has to punch his way through an entire building’s worth of enforcers, a tactical raid gone sideways, and a drug lord who prunes bamboo with the same calm he reserves for torture, that’s not his fault. Attack on Paradise is a neon-drenched, Dutch-language action film that had its world premiere at Fantasia 2026, and it hits hard.
Streaming Options
Attack on Paradise is a Fantasia Film Festival release and may not appear on streamers for some time. Head to Justwatch.com viz the link below and set an alert or follow Mother of Movies on any of our socials and we will let you know of any wide release details.
Attack on Paradise is streaming on:
“A building full of people who all want you dead, and all you came for was your mum’s medication.”
— Mother of Movies
Similar Films with Fight, Chaos or a One-Man Army
- The Raid (2011) — The vertical siege template, executed with Indonesian martial arts ferocity.
- Banlieue 13 / District 13 (2004) — Parkour-driven French action in a sealed-off urban block.
- They Will Kill You (2026) — Asia needs to save her sister. But she just needs to get past all the monsters first.
- Beef (2023) — Same slow-burn escalation logic, different genre, equally unresolved grievances.
- The Wrecking Crew (2026) — Two brothers band together to fight back against a local crime syndicate.
- Novocaine (2025) — Jack Quaid stars in a robbery gone wrong rescue and meet-cute all in one.
Spoiler Section, Who Dies
Mother of Movies: Spoiler Territory
Who Gets Out of the Building — and How
Proceed only if you’ve seen Attack on Paradise or simply cannot wait to find out who makes it to the top floor.
Attack on Paradise
Director: Bob Colaers
Date Created: 2026-07-19 20:03
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