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This short subject explores the function of irony in Woman at War (Erlingsson 2018), particularly through the lens of Paul de Man’s theory of irony and its connection to the parabasis of Attic comedy. It argues that the recurring appearance of musicians and Ukrainian chorus singers – visible only to the audience – acts as a structural interruption that breaks the film’s narrative coherence. These interventions signal a self-reflexive stance that undermines the film’s verisimilitude and complicates its engagement with environmentalist discourse in a late capitalist context. Here, irony is not merely rhetorical but also political: it exposes the gap between the urgency of the climate crisis and the inertia of state and corporate responses. The viewer is drawn into this paradox, positioned as a witness to both the collapse of narrative illusion and the spectacle of planetary collapse itself.