Schoolboy Veniamin has a strong feeling that the world is heading for destruction. Armed with quotations from the Bible and the unassailable conviction that he is the Chosen One, he sets out to correct at least those in his midst: his mother, his classmates and his teachers. His dogmatic behaviour gives some the pretext to vent their xenophobia; for others it’s a test of tolerance. Veniamin is prepared to use all available resources in the name of ideology. Thirty years after Vadim Abdrashitov’s Plumbum, or The Dangerous Game (Plyumbum, ili opasnaya igra, 1986), Kirill Serebrennikov has also come up with a film examining the seeds of belief-driven extremism, choosing to set the work in contemporary Russia, a country that craves a new ideology. The director previously created a successful stage production of the original story by German playwright and dramaturge Marius von Mayenburg. Screened in Un Certain Regard at Cannes, the film received the François Chalais Award as a work that best conveys the urgency of the present.