I Rarely Wake Up Dreaming

Isabelle Stever’s I Rarely Wake Up Dreaming begins by making us look from a distance. We seem to peek into the lives of Olya (Tania Myronyshena) and Oleh (Markus Bright) from behind a curtain, before a blackout interrupts the scene and makes the fracture already running through their relationship even harder to read. Later, their first sex scene is similarly observed through a corridor. We understand the intimacy without being invited fully inside it; the light, the framing and the physical distance are already enough to suggest that something has shifted.

That restraint defines much of Stever’s German-Ukrainian drama. Olya and Oleh are a queer couple whose private crisis suddenly collides with a much larger one when Russia launches its full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022. Oleh is a trans man, and the war turns a question of identity that the couple had been negotiating privately into something brutally public. Once the borders close to military-age men, papers, gender and the state acquire an immediate material weight.

The film’s pacing is measured, but for most of its 100 minutes purposeful rather than sluggish. Stever and screenwriter Anna Melikova build their characters patiently, helped by very strong performances from Myronyshena and Bright. Their relationship never becomes a convenient symbol with the people removed from it. There is tenderness, resentment, attraction and fear, often compressed into gestures or uncomfortable exchanges rather than explanatory dialogue.

I Rarely Wake Up Dreaming is uncompromising because the reality it depicts is. Rules do not become softer simply because someone’s circumstances are exceptional, and even the female soldiers Oleh encounters at the border can enforce them with chilling rigidity. Yet the film is delicate in the way it observes the couple, their relatives and the small signs that everyday life has ceased to function as before. A few shots of bewildered pets shut inside cages, transported away from homes they cannot understand they are leaving, are almost unbearably effective.

Technically, the film is impeccable and unmistakably cinematic. Considering the practical difficulties of shooting fiction in Ukraine during wartime — and of recreating both the period before the full-scale invasion and the years that followed — its level of control feels close to a production miracle. Volodymyr Usyk’s cinematography never prettifies the situation, but finds exact compositions for a world whose certainties are collapsing. The script is equally unwilling to clean up uncomfortable details or provide reassuring answers.

This is ultimately a film about two forms of instability unfolding alongside one another: a country in crisis and transition, and a person negotiating his own uncertain future. For Oleh, uncertainty becomes the only certainty; much the same can be said of Ukraine around him. Here, Stever’s achievement is to let these experiences resonate without forcing one to explain the other.