Director: Andrey Zviagintsev
Rating: 5/5

Given the paucity of Russian films dealing with the consequences of counter-revolution in the Soviet Union, this is a damning indictment of the coalition of capitalist gangsters and clerics destroying the last vestiges of socialism.

Worse, it stresses that despite having a — slightly Kafkaesque — judiciary there are ways and means, including murder, to disappear those who resort to law to expose criminality.

It centres on the life of Kolya (Alexey Serebryakov) and his family who attempt to challenge the local mayor (Roman Maydanov) idea of moving them out to build a luxury pleasure centre.

Although his lawyer Dmitriy (Vladimir Vdovichenkov) arrives to argue the case with facts it’s quickly made clear the “law” can be aided and abetted by bullies and blessed by the church.

Yet Leviathan is threaded through with nostalgia, some reminding of former glories from Ivan the Terrible to a picnic party to shoot framed pictures of leaders from Lenin to Yeltsin and Putin seen as “in need more historical perspective.”

Like Thomas Hobbes’s Leviathan it makes the point that without strong central power to control the masses, the forces of darkness would soon extinguish the light of life — here pathetically symbolised by the Pussy Riots.

It’s certainly a political parable about the class system, but provides nothing to suggest there’s a rumbling of discontent among Russia’s masses.

While they appear to want to ape the US — and the finale becomes a religious farce — the film, while cynical, proves there’s still some life in the Russian bear.

It is, like everywhere, being forced into action as the imperialist US is increasingly seen as the Leviathan suffering from a self-inflicted debilitating wound.

This ideology is dramatically illustrated by a Blue whale skeleton, beached and bleached in the sun while a live one raises and rolls in sea in the background to remind us of their existence.