Washed up on the desolate shore of the Barents Sea, the skeleton of a whale is the first and last hieroglyph the film offers us. A monumental fossil, the carcass of a sea god or perhaps a biblical demon, lying like a memento mori against the slate-colored sky. It is the totem image, the bony Ozymandias around which Andrey Zvyagintsev orchestrates his funeral symphony, a score of overwhelming, inevitable tragedy that does not merely tell a story, but dissects the very anatomy of Power. Leviathan is not a film, it is a treatise on political theology disguised as human drama; it is the Book of Job rewritten by Thomas Hobbes and filmed by an Andrei Tarkovsky deprived of all transcendent hope.

Our modern Job is called Kolya, a stubborn and proud mechanic who lives with his second wife Lilya and teenage son Romka in a house he built with his own hands. A house with a breathtaking view of the bay, a small kingdom of normality clinging to the edge of the world. But his little fiefdom, this shred of autonomous existence, stands on land coveted by Mayor Vadim, a local satrap whose corruption is so brazen that it becomes an art form, a natural emanation of the landscape. Kolya's struggle not to be expropriated is the trigger for a descent into hell that has the geometric precision of a theorem and the cruelty of a ritual sacrifice.

Zvyagintsev, the sublime narrative architect that he is, is not content with staging the classic clash between David and Goliath. Here, Goliath is not even an adversary you can look in the eye. He is an abstract entity, an all-encompassing, self-referential system. The Leviathan, in fact. It is not only Mayor Vadim, but the entire food chain that unfolds from him: the judges who read sentences already written with bureaucratic monotony, the police who carry out orders with resigned indifference, and, in a union as ancient as it is terrifying, the Orthodox Church that provides theological justification for abuse. In a key scene, the local priest, with the serenity of one who handles eternal truths, explains to the mayor that all power comes from God, effectively sanctifying his tyranny. It is the coldest and most precise representation of the symbiotic link between throne and altar, an alliance that serves not to elevate man but to crush him with the double weight of earthly and divine law.

The camera of Mikhail Krichman, a regular collaborator of Zvyagintsev, is a ruthless instrument of analysis. His shots are often static, wide, almost pictorial, and seem to be inspired as much by the metaphysical desolation of certain romantic paintings—think of Caspar David Friedrich's Monk by the Sea—as by the geometric sacredness of the aforementioned Tarkovsky. The characters are often tiny figures, swallowed up by a majestic and indifferent landscape, a non-place of low skies, icy waters, and barren land. The environment is not a backdrop, but a protagonist, an entity that reflects and amplifies the spiritual emptiness of its inhabitants. The icy palette, dominated by blues, grays, and muddy browns, is not an aesthetic quirk, but an ontological statement: this is a world from which warmth, both physical and human, has been drained.

The parallel with Job is the philosophical heart of the work. Kolya, like his biblical predecessor, loses everything: his home, his job, his wife, his freedom. But while Job, in the end, receives an answer from God from the whirlwind, showing him the incomprehensible vastness of his plan and the Leviathan as a symbol of his own power, Kolya receives no answer. His “Why?” is lost in the north wind. The Leviathan that devours him is not a divine creature whose logic is beyond human comprehension, but an entirely human monster, a social construct that has reached such critical mass that it has become a force of nature. It is the triumph of Hobbes' Leviathan, where man surrenders freedom in exchange for security, but in a perverse version where the state no longer offers any security, demanding only absolute submission. The law, here, is not an instrument of justice, but a weapon. Courtrooms are theaters of the absurd that would make Kafka's pale in comparison: bureaucracy becomes an esoteric language designed to confuse and exhaust, a labyrinth without a Minotaur because the labyrinth itself is the monster.

In this nihilistic universe, the only escape, the only sacrament left, is vodka. Its consumption in the film is incessant, Homeric, almost liturgical. It acts as an anesthetic against the pain of existence, as fuel for empty conversations, as a catalyst for explosions of violence and momentary, desperate brotherhood. During a memorable outing, Kolya and his friends use portraits of old Soviet leaders as targets for target practice, in a gesture that is both cathartic and futile. No matter what face power has, Zvyagintsev suggests, its oppressive nature remains unchanged. It is a melancholic carnival, a distant and desperate echo of the Russian tradition of the “holy fool,” the jurodivyj, who could speak truth to power precisely because he was on the margins of society. But here there is no truth left to tell, only impotent rage to drown in alcohol.

The systemic drama is mirrored and amplified in the personal one. Kolya's tragedy is not only public, but deeply intimate. His wife Lilya's betrayal with the Moscow lawyer, the friend who came to help him, is not just a simple melodramatic subplot. It is the perfect chiasmus of the main story: the corruption of the Leviathan creeps into the cracks of human relationships, poisons them, destroys them from within. The system not only crushes you from the outside, but also empties you from the inside, taking away your trust, love, and loyalty. Lilya's despair, her face a mask of silent suffering, is perhaps even more heartbreaking than Kolya's. She is the collateral victim, the one who senses before anyone else that there is no way out and chooses the only, terrible form of freedom left to her.

The ending is devastatingly powerful. On the ruins of Kolya's house, razed to the ground by bulldozers with the coldness of a surgical operation, a new, opulent church rises. During the inaugural sermon, the mayor listens to words about truth and divine justice with an expression of contrite hypocrisy. The circle is complete. The Leviathan has not only devoured its prey; it has consecrated the scene of the crime, transforming an act of abuse into a good deed. Truth, as the priest says, is in God, but it is a Truth that now serves to justify the most blatant of lies. The old whale skeleton on the beach, which at first might have seemed a symbol of death and decay, takes on a new meaning: it is the fossil of an ancient, natural, perhaps even divine power. The new Leviathan, the one made of concrete and gold, the one built on lies and blood, is much more frightening. It is a universal tragedy that, while rooted in the soil of a recognizable contemporary Russia (the portrait of Putin in the mayor's office is anything but a random detail), transcends its context to speak to anyone, anywhere, who has ever felt small and helpless in the face of the arrogance of power. Zvyagintsev has forged a grim and magnificent masterpiece, a film that does not merely observe the abyss, but forces us to feel its icy breath on our necks.