Zhanna Ozirna’s Honeymoon (Медовий місяць) is a film that speaks directly to our moment in history, an intimate yet shattering portrait of love under siege. Evocative of Raymond Briggs’s When the Wind Blows (1986), it shares that film’s power in portraying how geopolitical catastrophe intrudes upon the most personal, tender corners of ordinary life. With a lean 84-minute runtime, Honeymoon wastes not a second of its audience’s attention. It’s a feat of precise, urgent storytelling that balances romance, dread, and resilience with striking emotional clarity.
The film opens with celebration. Taras (Roman Lutskyi) and Olya (Irina Nirsha), newlyweds basking in the glow of their recent marriage, welcome the next chapter of their lives with a quiet joy. Their honeymoon isn’t a grand trip or lavish escape, it’s a few intimate days in their high-rise apartment in Kyiv. Yet this cozy sanctuary quickly becomes a cage when their lives are overturned by the escalating war in Ukraine. Ozirna immediately sets the tone, embedding us in the everyday rhythms of this young couple’s life before those rhythms are violently interrupted.
L-R: Irina Nirsha as Olya and Roman Lutskyi as Taras in HONEYMOON. Photo courtesy of SFFILM.
What makes Honeymoon so remarkable is how seamlessly it evolves from domestic drama into claustrophobic war thriller. This is not a film about the battlefield, but about the emotional terrain that war erodes. When Russian forces invade their building, the external conflict breaches the interior world that Taras and Olya have so carefully built together. Their private bliss becomes survival under siege, and every tender moment is charged with fear and uncertainty.
The two leads deliver performances that are nothing short of astonishing. Their chemistry is immediate and deeply felt, drawing the audience into their love story before gradually immersing us in their terror. Even as the walls close in around them, the emotional truth of their bond remains front and center. The actors navigate a harrowing emotional arc — from playful affection to existential dread — without ever losing their characters’ humanity. Their performances carry the film and are likely to leave viewers breathless.
Zhanna Ozirna’s direction is confident and deeply empathetic. For a debut feature, Honeymoon is an extraordinary achievement. She understands the power of restraint and intimacy, using close framing and a restrained camera to keep us inside the couple’s confined space. The cinematography feels deliberately unadorned, lending the film a realism that makes its suspenseful turns all the more potent. We aren’t just watching Taras and Olya, we are there with them, held hostage by the same uncertainty, the same helpless dread.
What’s perhaps most impressive about Honeymoon is its refusal to sensationalize. The film never resorts to melodrama, even as it builds genuine tension. Ozirna resists the urge to romanticize resilience or offer easy catharsis. Instead, she shows us what love looks like under extreme pressure — fragile, angry, brave, sometimes absurd. In doing so, she captures something essential about both war and marriage: the way they strip people down to their core.
L-R: Roman Lutskyi as Taras and Irina Nirsha as Olya in HONEYMOON. Photo courtesy of SFFILM.
Shot entirely on location in Kyiv, Honeymoon also doubles as a haunting time capsule. The city’s looming presence, once a symbol of home and possibility, becomes an unsteady backdrop to survival. Every creaking floorboard, every sound from outside the window carries weight. There is history embedded in the very walls of their apartment, and Ozirna taps into that with piercing clarity.
In a time when headlines often blur the human cost of conflict, Honeymoon offers a bracing reminder of what’s at stake. It’s a small story, told with enormous compassion and craft. Zhanna Ozirna’s debut is not only timely, it’s timeless in its depiction of how love endures, even when everything else falls apart. Honeymoon should be recognized as one of the great debuts in recent cinema, and a powerful entry into the canon of anti-war films.
Screening during San Francisco International Film Festival 2025.
For more information, head to the official SFFILM 2025 Honeymoon webpage.
Final Score: 3.5 out of 5.
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Categories: In Theaters, Reviews
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