“A harsh reminder that when war becomes a daily routine, no night is ever going to be truly quiet again.”

The odd thing about war is that life simply goes on, even under fire. Cinema has taught us that war is a mix of heroism and suffering, but in reality most of the time it has at least the semblance of normal life. People go to work, walk their dog, lose themselves at parties, go to the beach. This goes for Ukraine too, a country that has been at war and under siege for four years now. War simply becomes a part of life. The days are fine; it’s the nights that bring the heroics and especially the suffering. Most of Russia’s attacks come from the air, with the hum of drones piercing through the night. What it is really like to live in wartime is shown in Olga Chernykh’s The Illusion of a Quiet Night, which documents how war permeates life to the point where it becomes just another part of it.

Chernykh’s concept is fascinating not so much in what it does cinematically, but in how it shows the togetherness and the shared experience of a whole country that has to live through war. During one night in July 2025, hundreds of Ukrainians, ranging from professional filmmakers to regular people shooting on their phones, filmed their nightly experiences. All ages, all genders, and all over the country, from the ‘safer’ West to the occupied territories of Donetsk and Crimea. The resulting film, put together by Chernykh as a chronological collage of the varied footage, shows exactly what its title suggests: the illusion of a quiet night, until air raid sirens suddenly confront you with the harsh reality that life under siege is anything but normal. Yet what The Illusion of a Quiet Night also demonstrates is that, once the night is over, life simply goes on.

In the moment when the sirens go off and people try to find shelter, on a mattress in a hallway or on the platforms of Kyiv’s subway, or when they try to get their pets inside (cats, as usual, don’t follow instructions), the film suddenly grips you by the throat. Up until that point, which comes quite late in the film, war is relatively absent outside of the contributions of soldiers on the front line, and even those are mostly innocuous: somebody doing a tour of their unit’s temporary dwelling, a female soldier getting a birthday cake (and immediately providing some gallows humor when she is told it’s another year she has to get through: “Not necessarily“). An almost offhand remark by one soldier saying he was preparing the video to be about his commander until he died the week before is so blunt that the reality of it hardly sinks in. But the film’s tone shifts in the dark of night, and it’s remarkable how Chernykh achieves this from a multitude of short videos that are unrelated by geography or background, except for the shared threat that hangs over them. Just as quickly as it came, the dread also leaves the film. As dawn breaks, people come out of their shelters and begin the next day, as if hiding from bombs is just a part of life.

The film has neither a narrative nor a stylistic throughline, which makes some segments tough to sit through, but what it does capture is an unbroken spirit in the Ukrainian people. They have accepted this as part of their lives, at least temporarily, because they know the freedom of their country is more important than their occasional discomfort. Maybe the next night will be quiet, or the night after. A peculiar portrait of a country under siege and its indomitable spirit, The Illusion of a Quiet Night is a harsh reminder that when war becomes a daily routine, no night is ever going to be truly quiet again.