Atropia

Atropia (2025) is Hailey Gates' satirical war comedy, ready to watch online on iFILM. Out in the southern California desert, the US Army has built a fake Middle Eastern village from plywood and sand.

Fairuz is an Iraqi-American actress paid to play whatever the drill requires — a village local one morning, a chemical-weapons expert the next. The soldiers rehearsing here ship out for real soon. Then she falls for a man cast as an insurgent, and the unscripted feelings start pulling the whole staged war apart.

Alia Shawkat anchors the film between farce and unease, with Callum Turner, Tim Blake Nelson and Chloë Sevigny rounding out the cast. Gates turns the theater of simulated combat into something funny and quietly disturbing at the same time. The tagline calls it the story of a real fake place; that's exactly what it delivers. Stream Atropia online on iFILM.