‘I Rarely Wake Up Dreaming’ Review: An Unusual Ukrainian War Story

Russia’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine has prompted a wealth of urgent nonfiction filmmaking documenting the harsh realities of life under siege, but comparatively little dramatic storytelling — a space that the new German-Ukrainian production “I Rarely Wake Up Dreaming” occupies with bold formal imagination and a commitment to illuminating lives neglected in wider views of the conflict. A timely collaboration between German director Isabelle Stever and her wife, Ukrainian screenwriter Anna Melikova, the film is an intimate, bracingly intersectional relationship drama centered on a queer Kyiv couple whose attempts to flee to safety are complicated by local prejudice: a reminder that selective discrimination can still endure within a collectively persecuted population.

Premiering in the main competition at Locarno, this is a warmer, more humane work than Stever’s last film, the coolly provocative 2022 incest drama “Grand Jeté.” If that film could travel, even securing U.S. distribution with Altered Innocence, there’s no reason to think “I Rarely Wake Up Dreaming” — with its topical subject matter and emotional accessibility, plus the imprimatur of producer Tom Tykwer — won’t gain wider exposure still. Paris-based outfit Outplay Films, which specializes in LGBTQ-themed titles, picked up the film for international sales shortly before its Locarno premiere; queer-oriented distributors and programmers will take particular interest in a work that would stand out for its candid depiction of transgender marriage even without its complicating wartime context.

What Stever’s latest shares with “Grand Jeté” is a crisp aesthetic rigor that some viewers may find distancing despite the immediacy of the drama, though it has ample sensory rewards. The director and DP Volodymyr Usyk (who shot the celebrated 2024 wartime doc “Songs of Slow Burning Earth”) rarely permit us a close, unobstructed view of their principal characters, Olya (Tania Myronyshena) and Oleh (Markus Bright), often shooting them from afar in slivered, reflective surfaces, over another person’s shoulder or through staggered doorways. Actually seeing these lives takes patience and some concentration; in the unforgiving world of the film, many choose not to.

It opens on a conversation — viewed through a boxy apartment window at night, and later revisited on the other side of the glass — that finds Olya and Oleh’s longtime relationship at breaking point. “I entered a heterosexual relationship against my will,” Olya seethes to her partner. “You promised me you’d stay the same person.” Gradually, their history emerges: They met and got together as women in Kyiv’s small but throbbing queer scene, before Oleh came out as a trans man.

That hasn’t weakened their bond; indeed, Olya even proposed marriage to him, to the surprise and delight of her conservative suburban family, who take it as given that their new in-law is cisgender. (Children are expected in short order; Olya tends to swerve the subject.) But Oleh’s transition did more or less coincide with the Russian invasion, which has severely hindered his ability to live freely and openly at a time when men are expected to serve their country in the armed forces.

Medical certification of Oleh’s gender dysphoria cuts little ice with the military, who exercise institutional transphobia while taking him at his word regarding his identity. The couple’s plans to cross the border are thus mired in an absurdist tangle of administrative contradictions, and through the prism of Oleh’s impossible bind — in the eyes of the law, he’s at once recognized and rejected as the man he’s fought to be — Melikova’s script thoughtfully addresses how masculinity is defined and confined in the national psyche.

Both non-professionals who bring a degree of lived experience to their characterizations, Myronyshena and Bright underplay effectively, communicating through finely expressive gestures and mirrored body language, and bringing an in-the-moment rawness to their frankly intimate, occasionally confrontational dialogue. “I Rarely Wake Up Dreaming” isn’t fashioned as a performance showcase, however: The actors often feel another dynamic element in Stever’s complex mise-en-scène, sometimes tellingly cramped in Usyk’s tight, stylized compositions, or muted in Andreas Hildebrandt’s hauntingly sparse sound design, which is given no score to contend with. There are passages of bravura technique here: One dazzling tracking shot spans the crowded, kinetic turmoil of the border in wartime, flooded with the red and blue lights of state authorities — visually redolent of neon-streaked queer club nights from the couple’s recent past, but a whole life away.

A third-act development that again redefines the couple’s place in heteronormative society is somewhat rushed, leaning too heavily into melodrama to be wholly convincing. But it’s moving just the same, underlining the filmmakers’ interest in unorthodox found-family structures, and their foregrounding of minorities whose rights are often the first to be disregarded in times of national crisis. As the conflict in Ukraine trudges on, Stever’s stark, surprising film is a reminder that we’ve barely skimmed the surface of the country’s war stories.