For most of its running time I watched Shahrbanoo Sadat’s No Good Men the way you watch someone else’s careful dinner party: sympathetic, attentive, waiting for a guest to say the thing that cannot be taken back. The film is tender toward its people and awake to the humiliations of work and marriage in Kabul as the ground shifts beneath everyone’s feet.
The dildo scene, with Naru and two other Afghan women in the editing suite where the American/Afghan friend brings a dildo as a divorcing gift to Naru, is genuinely the only moment in the film where I sat up and thought, okay, this is interesting. It’s the one scene where Sadat actually starts digging into the generational misogyny of Afghan society and lets it get weird and uncomfortable (for that one character) and real. You can feel the film’s potential in that scene. And then it just… moves on. What follows is surface level observation dressed up as something more incisive. That’s not automatically a sin, but when you’ve already shown the audience what you’re capable of, pulling back feels like a choice you have to answer for.
No Good Men belongs to Naru, Kabul TV’s camerawoman, who starts out convinced the title is true and then meets Qodrat, a married reporter whose decency complicates her certainty. Sadat is asking a serious question: how do you hold women’s solidarity and romantic hope in the same hand when the world punishes both? I am glad the film complicates the slogan. A bleak title without texture is only branding. My problem is the specific complication. Naru’s attraction to a married man sits uneasily beside the sisterhood the story keeps asking us to believe in. That is not because flawed women are unrealistic. It is because the script never really presses on the contradiction. Some tensions deepen a drama. This one felt structural, and unattended.
Qodrat still earns his keep. In a society that rewards clever cruelty, learning that conscience is not a performance its own kind of courage. Naru could arrive at the same generosity without the romance. Let her watch him work from a distance. That would be enough. It might even be braver, and a better match for the nerve Sadat finds in the editing suite.
This is not a film without merit. It is a film that flashes something reckless, then returns to safer ground. I will remember the recklessness. I wish the rest of the running time had stayed in the room with it.