Starring Halldóra Geirharðsdóttir. In Icelandic, with English subtitles. Rated PG

Someone wearing a Nelson Mandela mask uses a rock to smash a drone she just shot down with a bow and arrow. That’s just one of many startling images presented by Woman at War, an ecopolitical action movie savvy enough to throw entertainment grenades at an audience that might be expecting lectures.

The woman in the mask, battling the power grid that she feels is overindustrializing Iceland’s rugged landscape, is Halla, a middle-aged choir director played magnificently by Halldóra Geirharðsdóttir, whom viewers may know from the Netflix crime show Case.

Here, she does double duty as our hero’s twin sister, Ása, a yoga teacher who is as serene as Halla is hopped-up. A pillar of the community most days, the latter been sabotaging electrical stations and cooking up a radical manifesto in her spare time.

She has help from someone inside the government (Jörundur Ragnarsson), but when he tells her it’s time to cool it—the CIA and the Chinese are getting involved now—she only gets more ambitious. Gee, lady, that sure is a lot of chicken manure! 

As if the stakes weren’t high enough, Halla gets word that the adoption she applied for years ago has suddenly come through, and she’s been matched with a four-year-old Ukrainian girl, orphaned in conflicts with the power-gridder called Putin. 

Will Halla yield to her maternal instincts or keep pulling warrior duty for Mother Earth? Things don’t stay that simple for writer-director Benedikt Erlingsson in his terrific follow-up to 2013’s Of Horses and Men, which also interrogated what it means to be Icelandic in a fast-changing world.

Here, he’s constantly shifting moods and color palettes, aided by three bearded musicians who accompany Halla’s adventures. When the adoption subplot kicks in, they are joined by a female trio of Ukrainian singers, marking the contrasts between male and female, militant and pacific, normal and just plain weird. All these elements head confidently toward an uplifting yet appropriately open-ended finish.