Naz, a nature photographer, describes shooting large-format prints of misty Ontario lakes and donating sperm before returning to his Chicago family home for his mother's birthday and his brother's prison release. He narrates events in interludes that move between past tense recollection and present participation, raising questions about narrative reliability. The household features squabbling siblings, an imperious patriarch, and a charismatic yet caustic mother, with meticulously engineered dialogue and mounting mayhem. The domestic conflict extends into public realms as politics and faith shape intimate choices. Realism dominates the surface while a metaphysical mist suffuses the atmosphere.
He'd been shooting large-format prints of lakes in Ontario, he explains, and was trying to capture the mist that rises off their mirrored surface at dawn. "It was really the fog that interested me-much more than the lakes," he says. "The right combination of fog and morning light and the lake reflecting it all was somehow very spooky and serene at the same time."
More than that-and unlike many feuding-family dramas in which the discord stays internal, a matter of personal slights and ancient resentments- Purpose situates its characters, over the course of nearly three hours, in a world beyond the living room, showing the impact that the realms of politics and faith have had on their most intimate life choices (and vice versa).
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