Some shorts don’t waste a second of their runtime, and Pickup is one of them. At just three minutes long, Viktoriia Lapushkina’s darkly comic micro‑film manages to build a world, skewer a cultural trend, and land a punchline sharp enough to echo long after the credits. It’s a tiny film with a very specific flavour — Soviet‑styled satire wrapped around a story about loneliness, performance, and the absurdity of modern dating “rules.”
The setup is simple but instantly intriguing. We drop into a lecture on femininity, where a glamorous instructor teaches a room of women how to attract male attention. Her advice is a mix of posture tips, sly smiles, and the kind of pseudo‑psychological tricks that feel uncomfortably familiar in the age of online “love coaches.” Among the students is Di, played with brilliant deadpan charm by Elizaveta Ishchenko — a shy outsider who looks like she’d rather be anywhere else.
Di’s assignment is straightforward: get a man to buy her a coffee. But when she attempts to put the lesson into practice, she wanders onto a rooftop and finds a man preparing to jump. Instead of panicking, she simply asks him to buy her that coffee. The moment is so blunt, so bizarre, that it flips the scene from bleak to hilarious in an instant. What could have been a grim encounter becomes a perfectly executed comedic twist, revealing just how ridiculous these “rules of attraction” really are.
Lapushkina’s approach is sharp and affectionate at the same time. Rather than moralising, she leans into satire, exposing the emotional manipulation behind fast‑love courses while keeping the tone playful. The film’s Soviet aesthetic — achieved through vintage lenses and an old factory location — gives it a textured, lived‑in quality that elevates the comedy. It feels like a lost relic from another era, even as it skewers a very contemporary phenomenon.
Ishchenko’s performance is the glue holding it all together. She’s magnetic without trying to be, her stillness and timing turning Di into a quietly compelling presence. In a film this short, every gesture matters, and she nails each one.
Pickup may be bite‑sized, but it’s the full package — funny, stylish, and surprisingly resonant. It’s easy to imagine this concept expanding into a longer piece, but as it stands, it’s a tiny gem making its World Premiere at Slamdance 2026.
