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(Fantasia Fest 2026) ATTACK ON PARADISE Equally Confined by Location and Cliches

By. Michael Fairbanks

Bob Colaers' ATTACK ON PARADISE, which had its world premiere at the 2026 Fantasia International Film Festival, toys with a setup we've seen numerous times since Gareth Evans' The Raid. A group of angry criminals and cops find themselves confined to a small building and mayhem ensues. However, usually these types of stories will take on the point of view of the people enforcing the law. The criminals are just bugs to be trampled so that mass audiences can justify the violence easily. Colaers teases a more novel approach. We’re trapped in this web of carnage with a man whose morality falls in the center. He’s neither a hardened gangster nor a saint. His reasons for staying inside the building are rooted in protecting his family, giving ATTACK ON PARADISE a more emotional core than some of its contemporaries. That subversion doesn’t lead to invention. This is still a pretty run of the mill brawler with a couple standout moments, but an earnest attempt at something different was made. 

We follow Suleyman (Saïd Boumazoughe), who is getting out of a seven year prison sentence for a brutal fight with two cops. He returns to the apartment building known as Paradise where his mother Fatima (Fatima Khanfour) lives with a nurse due to her health problems. The building is lorded over by drug dealer Prince (Achmed Akkabi) and his criminal associates but Fatima is just fine with that. She thinks she’s safe with them but she’s quite wrong. Soon, the police storm the building in search of Prince. Suleyman finds himself on the bottom floor when it goes down, so he has to work his way back up to his mother while taking on hordes of goons on both sides of the law. 

Fantasia's lineup has never been content to stick to one flavor of genre filmmaking. If ATTACK ON PARADISE delivers bruising action inside a single apartment complex, check out our review of DANCE FREAK, a surreal microbudget nightmare that swaps fists for cosmic weirdness.

ATTACK ON PARADISE at its most subversive when framing the police as a nondescript force of violence. We find them just as threatening as Prince’s minions and they spend the first act of the film taking each other out. This leaves Suleyman in some hectic pickles that are fun to watch him wiggle out of. Sadly, this aspect of the story mostly withers away once officer Yasmine (Clara Cleymans) joins forces with Suleyman. From there, the morality play is exactly what we expect and the film loses a lot of grit in the trade. 

 

The action is standard issue but well crafted. Saïd Boumazoughe is an imposing physical presence and it’s fun to watch him tussle with guys who are somehow bigger than him. The gunplay is a bit more visceral than the hand to hand stuff, though. Those moments feel a bit staged. Enemies wait their turns to attack Suleyman and everyone fights slowly enough to stay in frame. It just feels a bit like leftovers after being treated to the acrobatic mayhem of Kenji Tanigaki’s The Furious. In a sense, these two films are two incomplete parts of a masterpiece. The Furious lacked characters with any sense of depth or pathos. ATTACK ON PARADISE is a bit too stale with its showdowns. 

This is a reasonably entertaining fight-fest that could fare rather well on streaming. Colaers shows potential. Perhaps he could come up with something more creative if given a bigger budget. It just never goes over the top. Meanwhile, the cast only barely carries the day. They work well enough, but I don’t expect to see anyone in this mix again unless they’re getting beat up by a proper action hero in another movie. 

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