In an unlikely twist of fate, this horror director and American bluegrass musician have teamed up to give Ukraine the blockbuster treatment

Colin Freeman

Published 11 May 2026

Ukrainian film director Lubomir Levitski always wanted to make it big in Hollywood. He made his name at home with a Blair Witch-style horror flick about an ancient Slavic spirit, but when he finally moved to LA, the film gods were in a mischievous mood. “I spent four years there, but my main project was destroyed when Covid came along,” he says. “It felt like fate wasn’t allowing me to do this.”

Fate did indeed have other plans for Levitski – or rather, Vladimir Putin did. When the Russian leader sent his tanks into Ukraine in February 2022, Levitski began looking for war stories to tell about the bravery of the Ukrainian people, “to counter Russian propaganda”.

There were plenty of good tales around: the soldier who told a Russian warship to “Go f— yourself”; the farmers who towed away Russian tanks on their tractors. But one battlefield yarn, passed to him by a journalist pal, stood out. “He told me: ‘This will give you goosebumps.’”

An extraordinary survival tale

In June 2022, a married couple – Andrii Bohomaz and his wife, Valeria – were driving to evacuate elderly relatives from the city of Izium when they strayed down an empty country lane toward the Russian frontlines. Their car was hit repeatedly by shellfire, leaving Andrii badly injured by the roadside, his wife screaming for help.

In previous conflicts, both might well have died. Firstly, they were right in the Russians’ sights, making it impossible for rescuers to reach them. Secondly, they might never have been spotted on that remote road in the first place. Luckily, a drone operator call-signed “Sid”, from Ukraine’s 93rd Mechanised Brigade, observed the entire incident up close through his drone cameras, which showed Valeria trying to comfort Andrii as he lay unconscious in a pool of blood.

Figuring that Andrii was beyond saving, but that Valeria could be led to safety, Sid attached a message on a piece of A4-sized paper to a drone. It read: “Follow me”. He hovered it over Valeria, then guided her to the nearest Ukrainian position, down a road strewn with landmines. Meanwhile, Russian troops threw Andrii’s body into a ditch, presuming he was dead. A day later, he staggered back towards the Ukrainian lines, despite bleeding “like a sieve”, as Sid put it, from 30 different shrapnel injuries.

“At first I thought: ‘Could this really happen?’” says Levitski . “Then some commanders sent me the drone footage. They said: ‘Can we send it to CNN?’ I said: ‘No, I want to make a movie’.”

Levitski’s subsequent 30-minute documentary, Follow Me, went viral when released online that year, with some hailing it as a Saving Private Ryan for the drone era.

Wooing Washington

But for Levitski , that wasn’t enough. What about a blockbuster film version, with a few added plot lines? And, yes, in true Hollywood style, what about some American characters too? In Levitski’s eyes, this would make the film no less patriotic. With Washington still Ukraine’s biggest weapons supplier, a film that could engage US audiences might help ensure that the flow of arms continued. “If you don’t have American characters in a film, Americans won’t feel involved,” he points out.

The end product is Killhouse – a two-hour action thriller shot entirely in Ukraine, but including scenes in a fictional White House situation room, where an anxious president is told the classic line: “Sir, we have a major problem.”

The backstory is a variation on Follow Me, featuring a young couple venturing into no mans’ land to rescue their daughter, who has been kidnapped by Russian forces. When they then get shelled, a Ukrainian drone leads them back to safety. Enter a pushy American TV reporter, who reports on the unfolding rescue live from the scene, inadvertently sparking an international incident. It turns out – and this is where it gets a bit Bourne franchise – that her ex-husband is a CIA agent in Russia, whose cover is now at risk of being blown unless Ukraine can help. Cue a race against time, featuring battles, car chases, and a prisoner swap involving the reporter and the 12-year-old girl – much of it shot from a drone-eye point of view.

Hollywood twists aside, Levytskyi wanted the on-the-ground action as real as possible. Nearly all the cast’s soldiers are genuine members of Ukraine’s armed forces. He got help from Ukraine’s military intelligence service, the SBU, and the Third Separate Assault Brigade, who acted as technical advisers. And he got a real-life American reporter in Audrey MacAlpine, a Kyiv-based freelancer for United 24, a government-run TV channel.

Bluegrass musician to war-zone journalist to actress

Like Levitski, MacAlpine’s own career had been dramatically upended by the Covid outbreak. Prior to the war, she was not a journalist but a musician, playing double bass in bluegrass bands and hoping to make it in Nashville, the home of country music. Covid then cancelled what she hoped might be a breakthrough touring season of gigs and festivals. A year on, she was at Nashville’s Station Inn – bluegrass’s answer to Ronnie Scott’s – when her phone pinged with news alerts of Putin’s invasion of Ukraine. “I thought: ‘Oh my gosh, World War Three just started,’” remembers MacAlpine, 33.

True, perhaps, to the spirit of country music, which has long preached the merits of a freewheelin’ life, MacAlpine decided to try to help. She flew to Poland and ended up volunteering in Ukraine with the Scottish charity Siobhan’s Trust, which toured the country giving out freshly made pizza. “I’d never been to a war zone before – my knees were literally knocking when we first crossed the border,” she says.

After two years with the charity, she fancied a change, and decided to pursue a long-dormant interest in journalism. She wrote freelance articles – including for The Telegraph – and eventually landed a job with United24, which was recruiting native English speakers to expand their global reach. Soon she was visiting Ukrainian forces on the frontlines, watching first-hand how drones had transformed warfare. In one dispatch from the besieged Donbas town of Pokrovsk, she spent a night with a unit operating heavy bomber drones – known by the Russians as “Baba Yaga” or “vampires” because of the low, eerie hum that their rotor blades emit.

“Drones are now responsible for 90 per cent of casualties on the front line,” she says. She likens the arms race in drones – many of which resemble giant mosquitoes – to evolution in the insect world. “One develops a venomous bite, another creates a hardened shell – it just goes back and forth.”

She was initially sceptical when a scout for Levitski’s film crew, who had seen her frontline reports on TV, got in touch. “I thought it might be some corny low-budget thing, but when I saw the concept teaser, I realised it looked more like a multi-million Spielberg movie. And I thought: ‘Why not?’ Life had already taken unexpected twists.”

As MacAlpine was essentially playing herself, the acting did not prove too hard (although Levytskyi described her as a Hollywood natural). What was difficult, though, was filming a war thriller in an active war zone.

Filming in the field

Much of the film was shot on a dilapidated farm outside Kyiv last summer – a time when the Russians were pounding the capital at night with drones. “I was only getting about two hours’ sleep a night, and I’d be thinking: ‘Gosh, do I really have to film today?’” MacAlpine says. “When you stepped on to the set it didn’t feel like you were stepping into a movie, it just felt like a continuation of the world you were already living in.”

The Ukrainian armed forces lent Levytskyi US-donated Humvee and MaxxPro vehicles (again a way of showcasing America’s help in the conflict). But they would often be re-commandeered for frontline duties, presenting continuity challenges for the crew’s art department. Likewise whisked away was a US Black Hawk Sikorsky helicopter, which flew off to help in that summer’s invasion of Russia’s Kursk region. One crew member was also drafted during filming.

Using soldier-actors brought additional challenges. While they helped Levitski ensure each scene was realistic, it often meant rewriting them. “By the time I finished, it was a 50 per cent different script,” Levitski says.

Some scenes were also shot at the “Killhouse”, a specialist drone-training school in Kyiv, which gave the film its name. During one real-life air raid that took place during filming, MacAlpine briefly walked off set to do a live broadcast, wearing the same outfit she’d had on the film.

‘War crimes, love and hope’

Shot on a budget of just $1.1m, Killhouse finally opened at cinemas in Ukraine last month. The premiere featured a video address from Kyrylo Budanov, the former Ukrainian spy chief, once described by US officials as “George Smiley meets Jason Bourne”. He has a brief cameo role in the film – which, given how revered he is in Ukraine, is a considerable celebrity endorsement.

Also present was MacAlpine’s intrepid mother Helen, 68, who accompanied her on her first trip to Ukraine back in 2022. “I think she was thinking: ‘How the heck did my daughter end up doing this?’” MacAlpine says.

The film’s release has left both her and Levitski  pondering their next moves in life. MacAlpine’s old Nashville colleague Sierra Ferrell won four Grammy Awards in 2024, but MacAlpine has no regrets about leaving Nashville. She now plays with a local band in Kyiv, the Cherry Pickers, and still writes her own songs, although even by the story-telling traditions of country music, the tale of the country music gal who went to war, then became a reporter, and starred in a drone rescue movie might be a tough one. “I really don’t know what life has in store for me right now,” she says.

Levitski, meanwhile, is preparing an English-language version of Killhouse and is hoping for interest from Western distributors or Netflix. “This is a story about war crimes, love and hope,” he says, giving it his elevator pitch. “And it’s the first visual representation of the war with a blockbuster feel.”

Audience reaction in Ukraine has so far been positive, adds MacAlpine, who says it’s proving “very popular with military people and military-adjacent people”. Niche as that might sound, in Ukraine right now, that’s most of the country.

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/films/2026/05/11/killhouse-ukraine-warzone-film/