Dessa Faustova is a gifted Ukrainian ballerina on the cusp of preadolescence. With fellow dancers Klara and Inna, she comes into possession of a mysteriously coded address book, but their journey to decrypt its meaning stalls abruptly when Dessa is implicated in the gruesome murder of a local predator. Desperate for answers, she enlists the help of her enigmatic Uncle Leo, a glamorous con artist with a penchant for gambling and theft, who may or may not have deadly ties to Kiev's burgeoning underworld of the early 1990s. Dessa's dangerous foray into darkness parallels an insidious mania sweeping a nation still reeling from decades of oppression.