The Purpose: Failing Youth and Crises All Around in Drama on Ambition

A morbidly comical drama about two young women with dreams in the time of plague and war, Dimitri Nasennik’s The Purpose lets its heroines be two sides of the same coin of ambition held up in limbo.

Its star is Kristel (Natalia Shevchenko), a less lethal take on Killing Eve’s Villanelle. The sociopathy is casual, the preoccupation music, and the pockets much lighter—though her habit of pinching pennies is more likely just part of the unsettling/entertaining package. On the other hand, Nika (Daria Khvostenko) is soft, happy to be passive if needed, and full of feeling. Two unlikely friends, they are a generation that came of age during the pandemic. And if Kristel would do absolutely anything to be the first (female) violin in the Vienna Philharmonic, Nika would give up art school to appease the people in her life.

The 18-minute film privileges Kristel’s narrative over Nika, eased by the former’s fascinating antisocial apathy towards everything outside of her goal. She will charge strictly according to the terms of her contract, and take the performance where her discerning mind leads her (sometimes it is far from the funeral that she has agreed to perform for). Shevchenko’s politely methodical, borderline frightening, portrayal builds up the film into a crescendo that threatens to take everyone down with it.

But the scale of her life is overall on a more modest scale in comparison to larger than life anti-heroines. What we find in Kristel instead is intense determination that would zap the joy and humanity out of most people. With Nika as her foil, Kristel outlines the scope and hurdles of female ambition against the backdrop of multiple simultaneous crises in the film’s most significant scene that provides insight into one character and incites another to action.

The climax is a sobering affair, relentless in its effect, as Kristel finds herself performing at yet another inconveniently timed funeral. It brings Kristel and Nika’s scene to a head as each character is confronted with the weight of their aspirations and talent. Their purpose, and the price they have paid or will pay for it. Safe to say, Kristel will tender exact change.

Watch The Purpose Short Film Trailer