Locarno Review: I Rarely Wake Up Dreaming Charts an Oddly Mute Queer Romance in Wartime Ukraine

It is late at night and Kiev is fast asleep when Isabelle Stever’s I Rarely Wake Up Dreaming opens on Olya (Tania Myronyshena) and Oleh (Markus Bright) arguing in their living room. You must prick up your ears to hear their muffled voices and squint to see their faces clearly—we’re watching them bicker through the window of the next-door flat, and there’s a twitchiness to Volodymyr Usyk’s handheld camera that suggests this is too intimate a moment for anyone to eavesdrop. Yet we do. All through Dreaming, Stever likes to film her protagonists from afar, and this first shot heralds several others that capture the couple from a different room, with corridors, windows, and door frames protecting them from intruders. Which feels fittingly respectful for a love story marred by all sorts of humiliations. But it also exemplifies a distance between characters and spectators that Stever never fully bridges—oddly enough, her film can often keep you at arm’s length, and its most lyrical images do not quite add up to a cogent whole.

Olya and Oleh are a young Ukrainian queer couple, and Oleh a trans man who fled native Odessa to seek love and refuge in the capital. A successful pursuit, at least judging by the New Year’s Eve party Stever winds back to after the film’s preamble. There are only a few hours left to 2022, and in the neon-soaked, electronica-pilled bliss that envelops the two lovers, to linger on the rumors that the Russians are amassing troops at the border feels kind of blasphemous. This is the year they’ll get married, to the delight of Olya’s conservative parents, who assume Oleh to be cisgender and keep nagging him about children. But then the war breaks out, and as the country wakes up battered by Russian air strikes, Oleh joins Olya and her family on a desperate race to the nearest border. To no avail: all men aged 18 to 60 must stay and fight, and now that his passport identifies him as male, Oleh cannot abdicate his duties.

There’s something very provocative about the film’s decision to reframe Oleh’s gender affirmation as a sort of wartime curse. Written by Stever’s wife and collaborator Anna Melikova, Dreaming devotes ample time to the implications of his transition in a society where the very idea of manhood has taken on an inescapably militaristic dimension. But the way Stever dramatizes those concerns feels prosaic. Her film wants to trace a correlation between Oleh’s identity crisis and his own country’s, between an individual and a nation that are both trying to find themselves and resist forces that would rather wipe them out altogether. That’s an apt analogy, if one that Dreaming seems frustratingly engineered to draw. Its dramatic logic is almost transparent in its forceful connection of the micro and macro; and Oleh, for all the intricacies of his existential struggle, sometimes registers as a chess piece moving along a monotonously literal trajectory.

Bright—like Myronyshena, a non-professional at his first acting role—radiates a deep-seated vulnerability, which befits a part that reduces him to a punching bag onto which people can project their own ideas of how a man should look, act, and be. Olya wants him to forsake his identity in exchange for a safe passage to Germany (“then you’ll reincarnate again”); her mother swears him off condoms (“so you’ll give us grandchildren”); an altercation at the local market earns him a black eye (any man who’s not at the front is no man at all). But these incidents do not reveal much about Oleh’s inner turmoil. If anything, they’re more subservient to the plot: clues that appear designed to make his final decision seem, in retrospect, almost inevitable.

Refreshingly, Stever keeps the conflict by and large off-screen. The invasion comes to us parceled out via news bulletins or ricocheting off Andreas Hildebrandt’s sound design, with the deflagrations of Russian missiles echoing ever closer to the frame. It’s a choice that helps Dreaming sideline cheap spectacle and find more singular, graphic surrogates for the omnipresent violence. An extreme close-up of a nail drill bit painstakingly removing cuticles from Olya’s fingers, or a defrosted octopus chopped to bits by a frustrated Oleh: such ominous interludes clash with quieter ones from life before the invasion. An early, unbroken shot of the two lying naked in bed, the camera eyeing them prudishly from the corridor so that only their legs protrude through the door, feet agleam in the neon lights flickering from the street, might well go down as the film’s most indelible. It is easy to write about some of Dreaming’s most entrancing images, much harder to shake off the feeling that they function best as independent units rather than tesserae of a fully-formed mosaic.

That a work of fiction could come out of a country whose cinematic output after February 2022 has consisted almost exclusively of unflinching war documentaries is nothing short of remarkable. For that alone, Stever’s latest is cause for celebration. But there’s a difference between a film of the moment and one that can meaningfully engage with those living through it. By the end, all the efforts to justify Oleh’s choices and find a continuum between his restlessness and Ukraine’s own wind up turning the man into a kind of equation to be resolved. A few disquieting sequences notwithstanding, Dreaming is too narrow and calculated a vessel to bear the full weight of his enigmas.

I Rarely Wake Up Dreaming premiered at the 2026 Locarno Film Festival.