German director Valeska Grisebach follows up on “Western” (2017) with a film that could justifiably have the same name. Once again she mounts a slow, Eastern Europe-set spin on the classic genre, powered by the highly specific tensions in and around a small desolate town in Svilengrad, a tripoint of Bulgaria, Turkey and Greece.
The principal locations are the modern equivalent of a one-horse town; to prove this, our hero encounters that one horse the moment he arrives. Long barren roads are illuminated by the distant neon of attractions that no one ever visits. Cars are essential for traversing the dusty stone tracks between houses and the few other scattered points of interest. Business deals occur while seated on plastic chairs outside of trailers.
This sleepy surface conceals the racial and religious tensions between locals and the transient workers who cross the border for employment. Criminals operating at different rungs of the ladder dominate the only real sources of money. The serious operators are into people trafficking, it’s irresistible given the location. Everyone is involved in a turf war of some kind, major or minor. The scarcity breeds it. The mafia used to loom large here. Now the two adversarial power-brokers are the unseen Raven and Iliya (Stoycho Kostadinov, seemingly a bodybuilder in real life).
We motor into Svilengrad with a lone ranger named Said (Syuleyman Letifov). He has left his home in the Rhodope Mountains to visit the place where 30 years ago he was part of something that won’t stay buried.
Grisebach has a flair for finding faces with striking, weatherbeaten features that might have grown out of the landscape itself. We are in an era where the cinema normalizes faces interrupted by Botox and fillers, amounting to propaganda against aging and even mortality itself; by contrast, the faces that fill Grisebach’s frames are a cool drink of mountain water. Whorled with wrinkles and creases, these faces signify that we’re in a place where rugged features are the norm and time cannot be artificially held back.
Letifov, who also appeared in “Western”, has an incredible face. Hooded eyes give him an inscrutable expression until an infectious boyish grin opens his features, extending from a deeply grooved chin dimple to the crow’s feet around his eyes. Self-possessed and amiable, he manages to look both old and young. Perhaps this is why, during an early encounter, a precocious kid offers to find Said a girlfriend, presenting the two universally acknowledged types of female: “Do you want old or young?”
The motives for Said’s return to Svilengrad are never made convincing. There is a business deal to handle, sure, and he has a bag of cash to hand over. Still, it seems more likely that he has blown in on the winds of fate to answer for deeds he can’t forget. These winds blow him into contact with Veska (Yana Radeva) an archaeologist leading a dig in the small nearby village of Matochina. Since this is something of a lawless place, Said’s car is stolen (he does not seem remotely surprised or alarmed) and Veska comes to his aid, chauffeuring him to his meeting with the low-level thug from whom he intends to purchase fuel.
This gender flipped, damsel-in-distress scenario continues to play out for Veska is no ordinary woman. Her childhood hero was Conan the Barbarian (“he has no fear”). She has been playing poker with egoistic men for her whole life and has learned to appear unruffled in the face of peril. She walks with extreme slowness, as if each step is the result of a deliberate choice. This air of ponderousness is undercut by sharp wit that enables her to swiftly reframe incoming aggression in her favor.
Radeva is in many ways the female Letifov. Her smile turns her into a girl again, and her thick blonde locks could have been shorn off a Disney princess. Yet she is another plucked-from-life Grisebach character with a face that holds a thousand stories. “The Dreamed Adventure” is her first acting role and it is her real experience that qualified her for the part. Find us a Hollywood actress who has spent time on geological mapping of the Strandzha mountains, or on geochemical searches for gold.
This is Veska’s film, Said’s role was to bring us to her and once this is achieved, his character disappears. The question of whether foul play is involved remains open, as Grisebach is not one to drum up hysteria or tension. Instead, we stick to Veska’s side, lightly fearing for her due to the loneliness of every location and the nothing-to-lose situations involving her predominantly male companions. Like Conan, Veska moves through the world without fear, but that doesn’t make it true for those of us watching her.
Veska’s job digging up the past literalizes the arc of her character during this stay in Matochina. It turns out that Iliya used to be infatuated with her, a history that complicates his newly emergent position of power. He is used to controlling everyone with money, threats, or a combination of both. Veska contends with a different image of him, which is brought to the fore when she starts to fear for Maria (Denislava Yordanova), a young woman who reminds Veska of who she used to be.
Grisebach’s understated approach to character works evocatively at the start when it is a question of blending them into this very specific place (filmed with consistent majesty by cinematographer Bernhard Keller) and teeing up the mystery of the past. However it falters when it comes to paying off that mystery and exorcising the ghosts that Veska is reckoning with. While it makes sense that someone of her temperament would avoid verbose confessions, the disclosures that do occur feel discouragingly weightless, especially since they arrive after a challenging narrative lull.
Fittingly for a film full of characters held in limbo by the push and pull of different tensions, “The Dreamed Adventure” neither goes down in a hail of bullets, nor rides off happily into the sunset.
Grade: B
“The Dreamed Adventure” premiered at the 2026 Cannes Film Festival. It is currently seeking U.S. distribution.
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