A family sits down to dinner: a mother, father, teenage son and daughter. They are speaking Arabic. The doorbell rings.
"I'm just a citizen. I'm here to help," says the blue-eyed man at the door.
Moments later, he forces his way inside at gunpoint. Confronting the family, he orders the teenage boy—involved in the gang rape of a 14-year-old girl—to summon his five accomplices. When they arrive, the man executes them all, along with the rest of the family.
This is a scene from Citizen Vigilante (2026), the latest film by German director Uwe Boll. The story follows a former American soldier turned landlord in Croatia who embarks on a campaign of vigilante justice, defending white European women and girls from migrant men portrayed as sexual predators and an incompetent state depicted as soft on sexual violence.
While many dismissed the film for its poor cinematic quality , others focused on its politics. Zeteo ’s Mehdi Hasan described it as "90 minutes of unabashed far-right political propaganda". The Muslim Council of Britain wrote that it was "replete with Islamophobic tropes".
The film's significance, however, extends beyond questions of artistic merit or racial ideology. As Abdallah Saif of Muslim Engagement and Development has warned , Citizen Vigilante risks legitimising violence against racialised communities.
We should not underestimate cinema's capacity not only to reflect political violence but to rehearse it: to teach audiences who deserves protection, who constitutes a threat, and who is entitled to kill in the name of justice.
Femonationalism
The claim that Muslim and migrant men pose a unique sexual threat to white European women has become a familiar refrain in far-right politics.
Across Europe and North America, the far right has increasingly instrumentalized sexual violence to advance anti-immigration and anti-Muslim agendas. Indeed, femonationalism – the appropriation of feminist rhetoric in the service of nationalist and anti-immigrant politics – has become a staple of far-right political culture.
Groups and individuals warn of the "Islamic rape of Europe", spew slogans about " rapefugees ", and spread images depicting bearded men pursuing white women.
Sexual violence is represented not as a crime that occurs across societies but as the product of supposedly backward cultures seen as not yet having progressed into the age of gender equality. Rape becomes imagined as culturally distinctive—a characteristic of Muslim or migrant communities. In this way, the figure of the migrant is racialised through the language of sexual threat.
This is precisely why such narratives often evade accusations of racism. Rather than invoking biological superiority, the far-right focuses on ‘women's safety’, which allows them to present policies as moral necessity.
But such ideas have a much longer history. They echo imperial feminism , which mobilised so-called women’s liberation to justify military intervention and colonial domination. Similar ideas can be found in nineteenth-century representations of the "Orient", where Muslim men were depicted as sexually dangerous predators threatening white women.
Fears of the " Yellow Peril" and " Black Peril" similarly cast Asian and black men as hypersexual threats to white femininity and, by extension, the racial order itself.
Comparable narratives circulate elsewhere today. In India, Hindu nationalists peddle the conspiracy theory of " love jihad ", which alleges that Muslim men systematically seduce Hindu women as part of a plot to covert, Islamise, and thus bring about Hindu genocide.
“Kill your rapist”
These narratives do more than racialise Muslims and migrants. They offer a rationale for lethal violence.
Racialised sexual violence offers the perfect metaphor for reasserting far-right claims of a Great Replacement. Nations have long been coded as female. Within this framework, the rape of white women comes to signify more than an individual crime: it becomes evidence of the invasion of Europe by brown, black, and non-Christian bodies.
More than invasion, rape implies conquest. As women are often imagined as symbolising the home, the family, and the reproduction of culture, the rape of white women comes to imply the penetration of the very heart of the nation.
Moreover, carrying meanings of immorality and impurity, rape transmits the threat of racial miscegenation, cultural dilution, and thus the demise of cultural continuity. And as the ultimate expression of women’s subjugation, rape conveys a sense of the loss of those cultural conditions attributed with giving birth to women’s freedom and emancipation—civilisation, democracy, and feminism. As such, it functions to confirm the so-called Islamisation of Europe and “ white genocide .”
Consequently, violence begins to appear as morally justified and necessary. And the target expands beyond an offender to encompass entire racialised populations imagined as collectively threatening. In this way, the discourse of rape becomes an incitement to collective punishment.
White supremacist violence has repeatedly enacted this logic. The perpetrator of the 2019 Christchurch mosque massacre invoked sexual violence against white women as part of the ideological justification for murdering 51 Muslim worshippers. His manifesto's chilling injunction—"Kill the rapists, hang their families"—collapsed the distinction between alleged perpetrators and an entire community.
The same logic also justifies state violence. Allegations of sexual violence committed during the 7 October 2023 became part of the rhetoric through which Israel's military campaign in Gaza was framed as a civilisational struggle against barbarism. The discourse expanded beyond the individual actors to justify devastating violence for an entire population.
History demonstrates that these politics are not new. In the post-Reconstruction American South, allegations of sexual misconduct by black men regularly served as pretexts for lynchings, mob violence and racial terror. The accusation of rape functioned as a licence for collective punishment.
A pedagogy of violence
This broader political context is what makes Citizen Vigilante so dangerous. The film does not simply reproduce racist ideas, it fuels the political logic for them.
It repeatedly organises the world around three figures: the imperilled white woman, the predatory Muslim or migrant man, and the feeble liberal state incapable of protection. Scenes of stabbed and battered women are interspersed with news reports of police failure and judicial incompetence, constructing a world in which institutions have been paralysed by political correctness.
The protagonist, played by Armie Hammer, reinforces this lesson through direct-to-camera social media broadcasts. He tells his followers they are suffering from "sleep paralysis": deceived by elites and blind to the danger surrounding them. "We can change history. I'm here to help you take that control back," he declares.
The shift from addressing fictional followers to addressing viewers is subtle but important. The audience is invited to understand itself as part of a political community defined not by citizenship alone but by a willingness to act beyond the law.
The film then demonstrates what such action entails. The protagonist assaults migrant youth, executes sexual offenders, murders entire families and kills police officers who attempt to stop him. Yet these acts are not framed as crimes. Through triumphant music and affirming social media commentary, vigilantism is recoded as courage and murder as moral responsibility. Violence becomes civic virtue.
Its visual language reinforces this message. The camera lingers on executions, bloodied bodies and scenes of retribution with an aesthetic of gratification rather than horror. Violence is not simply shown; it is rendered satisfying.
In this respect, Citizen Vigilante functions as a form of political pedagogy. It offers viewers not merely a story but a lesson about how to interpret the world. The point is not that films mechanically produce violent actors. Rather, they can cultivate habits of perception and judgement that make violence appear legitimate, necessary and even pleasurable.
That is why the danger posed by Citizen Vigilante lies less in its artistic shortcomings than in its political instruction. Certainly, the script and performances are mediocre, but the film also offers something far more consequential: a practical demonstration of a racial logic in which the defence of women, nation and civilisation culminates in the moralisation of murder.
It is a reminder that cinema does not simply reflect political culture. It can also help to produce it.
Dr Amina Shareef is a researcher specialising in anti-Muslim racism. Her research focuses on hijab politics, gendered Islamophobia, counter-extremism policy, anti-Muslim street violence, and the far right.
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