Leviathan review: an uneasy allegory on modern Russia

"The soul of the Russian people is reawakening," promises one of Leviathan's coterie of creepy priests. Yes. But to what end?

Andrey Zvyagintsev, one of the most reliably dazzling talents in world cinema, last reached Irish cinemas with Elena, which forged a delicious domestic thriller from Moscow's burgeoning class system. Leviathan harks back to the director's trickier, earlier film, The Banishment: we know we're watching a political allegory, but the real-world parallels form sneaky squiggles, not straight, satirical lines.

A loose reworking of The Book of Job, Leviathan concerns Kolya (Aleksei Serebryakov), the head of a dysfunctional family in a far-flung northwest Russia. A chain-smoking drunk, he's an unlikely hero, but we do, nonetheless, take his side when a crooked mayor (Madyanov) attempts to seize the family home. Enter Dmitri (Vdovitchenkov), a slick Muscovite lawyer with a thick folder detailing mayoral corruption. "I believe in facts," Dmitri says repeatedly. Sadly, in this environment, facts may not be enough to save the farm. Kolya, we soon realise, is being tested by modern Russian, not God.

Nobody does unease like Zvyagintsev: you’d have to go back to Kubrick, then Hitchcock, to find a film-maker so willing to toy with his audience.

Everything in Leviathan's post-industrial landscape looks hazardous: from the jagged cliffs to the AK-47s that appear during a family hunting trip. Some are MacGuffins; others loom with intent. An incident during a family outing cuts maddeningly away to a subplot.

Political skulduggery and sinister links between church and state appear to poison all human life. Everywhere looks like a disused quarry. Everyone drinks too much. The only source of local employment is at a grim fish-gutting factory. Familial discord is rife: Kolya’s younger second wife is hated by his teenage son. A family friend explains mayhem to her own young son as: “Remember when you set the cat on fire?”

“Why do you want to kill me?” Kolya’s wife asks a boisterous kid with a toy gun: “Because you’re pretty,” comes the chilling response.

During the hunting scene, a man produces a series of portraits of historical Soviet leaders to use as target practice. He doesn’t have any recent ones, he says, because “we should let them ripen up on the wall for a bit”.

The film-makers may have hoped to avoid censure, but Leviathan's smuggled state of the nation has not yet been screened in its motherland. The film, which won Best Screenplay at Cannes, was one of the first major casualties of Putin's new stringent laws against swearing. It is still awaiting an official release date.