Brides review – teenage girls head to Syria for IS and marriage in powerful and poignant drama

T he phenomenon of Islamic State brides , which became a press preoccupation with the case of Shamima Begum – who 10 years ago left the UK at the age of 15 to join IS and is still in a Syrian refugee camp – is now filtering through to fictional representations; they are striving for a sympathetic, intimate way of intuiting the motives and feelings of young women who were hardly more than children when they were radicalised, and somehow get more pruriently disapproving media coverage than the male jihadis. Nussaibah Younis’s hit comic novel Fundamentally tells the story of an aid worker tasked with bringing IS brides home to the UK, and now there is this watchable comedy-drama from screenwriter Suhayla El-Bushra and director Nadia Fall .

It is about two teenage girls: shy, thought