No Way Out
By Dan Schindel
New York Film Festival 2026:
I Rarely Wake Up Dreaming
Dir. Isabelle Stever, Germany/Ukraine, no distributor
War as the most extreme expression of masculine power has been a subject of art and literature for millennia, but the fraught gender politics of war have never manifested quite like they do in I Rarely Wake Up Dreaming. The film, the second collaboration between married director Isabelle Stever and screenwriter Anna Melikova, turns the Ukrainian home front of the Russian invasion into a crucible of daunting choices for a transgender man.
At the start of the story, Oleh and Olya (Markus Bright and Tania Myronyshena, both journalists and activists appearing in a film for the first time) have found a pleasant groove. Oleh is well along in his transition, and they live comfortably in Kyiv with a strikingly blue-eyed French bulldog. The Russian invasion spurs them to flee to the countryside to stay with Olya’s parents (who think Oleh is cis), but their attempt to cross the border for safety is stymied by martial law’s prohibition on men aged 18-60 leaving the country.
From there, the couple is trapped in a bureaucratic snare. Many upbraid Oleh for not doing his patriotic duty by enlisting in the army, and if they are aware he’s trans, their contempt is even more poisonous. One harrowing scene has Oleh interrogated by female border guards, who sneer, “You’re man enough to marry, but for your country, you’re a woman?” and “I don’t care what’s in your pants; only on your passport.” His options for avoiding the draft—detransitioning to get past the border or having his dysphoria certified as grounds for a medical exemption—would require him to surrender the legitimacy of his gender. At the same time, despite his fear of combat, he’s nagged by the feeling that joining the army is the right thing to do, both as a “real man” and as a citizen.
This morass of bad options only gets worse as the years trudge by and the war curdles into a stalemate. The narrative sees more ellipses in its back half, with the characters’ living situation changing while the war around them drags on—after one time jump, they have a young boarder with them in her parents’ house, after another, they’re back in their Kyiv apartment, implying that despite the danger, there’s nowhere else to go.
The film explores war as the most extreme rendering of how circumstance can exacerbate a couple’s prior strains. The movie begins in media res with a flash-forward to Oleh and Olya’s low point, an argument in which she says that she was “drafted into a heterosexual relationship against [her] will” by Oleh’s transition. This bracing demonstration of her resentment colors our understanding of their relationship even in the story’s early, apparently idyllic phase, like their somewhat awkward physical intimacy in a sex scene that, ominously, ends with the invasion’s commencement. She suggests that detransitioning and retransitioning in another country would be to “reincarnate again,” as if it’s no great demand. Their big argument plays out in the opening from a distance, shot through a window outside their apartment, their voices muffled. When it’s revisited late in the film, the camera is in the room with them, physically realizing the familiarity it’s built with the characters over time. In both iterations, the sequence closes with the building’s power cutting out.
I Rarely Wake Up Dreaming excels in using little details to contour its nightmare concept. We don’t hear much about Oleh’s relationship with his father, but we know he isn’t out to him because he tries to raise his voice and uses female verb endings when speaking with him on the phone. A sequence tracking a caravan of refugees focuses on the various pets they’ve brought with them, all bathed in red light. It progresses from shots of expected dogs and cats to caged animals like gerbils and birds, driving home the upsettingly uprooted domesticity.
The unresolved status of the war unfortunately bleeds into the film’s difficulty with its ending. Finding a definitive statement within this conceit is an unenviable task, but the film settles on a conclusion that feels pat in its use of the hallmarks of traditional family construction. The arrival of a baby helping to mend a troubled relationship isa dissatisfying resolution even in a heteronormative context; it feels especially reductive in a film about the thorny gender-based contours of a queer relationship. The movie exactingly recreates the circumstances of war, but its attempt to provide a sense of closure is less convincing.