‘After Dreaming’ Review: A Hypnotic Portrait of an Armenian Existence Defined by War

· February 17, 2025

Variety

‘After Dreaming’ Review: A Hypnotic Portrait of an Armenian Existence Defined by War

Christine Haroutounian wields a disembodied lens in her enticing feature debut.

In her self-assured first feature, Christine Haroutounian transforms a seemingly simple road trip into a complex odyssey across the Armenian landscape. It begins with the mistaken killing of a well-digger, whose family doesn’t want to break the news to his teenage daughter Claudette (Veronika Poghosyan). So, they enlist disaffected soldier Atom (Davit Beybutyan) to drive her far away until the funeral is over, leading to an intimate and unexpected relationship. However, this seemingly straightforward plot is quickly subsumed by a stream-of-consciousness approach to the narrative, enhanced by an equally ethereal photographic aesthetic.

The result is a dreamlike film that floats on air, while keeping the sharp fall beneath it in constant view. For many in the Armenian diaspora — including, presumably, the Los Angeles-born Haroutounian — their cultural identity and connection to the land itself are fraught, given the numerous conflicts in the region leading to the expulsion of ethnic Armenians. This feeling of instability is baked into the film’s unfurling, owing to how and when it was conceived. Its story, punctuated by the sensation of war as a disorienting constant, first took shape in 2019, only for the Second Nagorno-Karabakh War to shape it further the following year — eventually leading to the displacement of over a hundred thousand Armenians in 2023.

The film, however, bears no clear timeline, other than the vague notion of modernity. It is, quite fittingly, a work of temporal displacement, buoyed by occasionally surreal imagery, and repetitive, poetic dialogue that plays like a stuck record — like history repeating itself while skipping beats. Shot with a floating, hand-held camera, the dramatic compositions it yields are oblique, but entirely novel. As Atom and Claudine traverse the countryside and meet various other characters (cast mostly from non-professional actors), the frame takes on a spectral presence. This is largely owed to its dizzying use of focus, with parts of the frame blurred laterally, à la the works of Julian Schnabel, rather than across three dimensions, resulting in a painterly visual tilt-shift. The film’s ghostly images are at once flattened and alive, hovering in visual purgatory as scenes begin to feel not only like fever dreams, but out-of-body observations of the dreamers themselves.

Haroutounian and cinematographer Evgeny Rodin achieve this liminal approach to character by separating the lens from the camera, all but embodying the sense of dissociation underlying the movie’s drama. Atom and Claudine get to know each other gradually, piquing our curiosity all the while, but the film often skips around in time. Most notably, it jumps forward to their wedding alongside dozens of other couples, in an extended sequence of cultural celebration shot uncomfortably up-close. The longer this scene unfolds (it lasts over 15 minutes, mostly in a single take), the more exuberant it becomes, but the more Haroutounian also begins to twin its celebratory images with that of military tradition. Sounds of fireworks soon blend together with guns and bombs. War never ends, even in joyful moments. It never leaves.

The central plot, about two characters thrown together by circumstance, begins to feel entirely incidental and metaphorical beyond a point. (This despite the significance of mass weddings in recent Armenian history: This was a repopulation effort in 2008). While its lead actors’ performances imbue Atom and Claudette with recognizable humanity, the film’s artistry turns them into ciphers and symbols of the numbing effects of ethnic conflict. Atom’s removal from his post, and Claudette’s removal from her family, leave an absence the movie never fills, as though life has gone on without them, and we’ve been made privy to what has been unfolding outside the frame during someone else’s story.

The more the camera lingers on them, the more they seem like living ghosts who belong to a world that no longer exists — or one that exists primarily in the psyche of the diaspora, and the displaced. Rarely does “After Dreaming” ruminate on specific political machinery; rather, it captures a political spirituality, turning its tale of romance deeply haunting in the process.