Quartile rating: 8/10 · 1 rating
In a Russian coastal town, Kolya is forced to fight the corrupt mayor when he is told that his house will be demolished. He recruits a lawyer friend to help, but the man's arrival brings further misfortune for Kolya and his family.
Leviathan is a masterfully crafted Russian drama with a richly layered plot drawing on the Book of Job and Kafkaesque bureaucratic despair. The performances, particularly from Aleksey Serebryakov, are raw and commanding. Zvyagintsev's cinematography is stunning — the vast, cold coastal landscapes dwarf the characters and amplify their helplessness with painterly precision. The film's portrait of corruption and institutional rot feels specific yet universal. Novelty is solid but not exceptional — the theme of the little man crushed by the state is well-trodden in Russian cinema. The ending is bleak and thematically coherent but lands with a somewhat expected inevitability rather than genuine surprise.