Leviathan (2014)

Leviathan opens on a northern Russian coastal town, a heap of whale bones on the shore, and a car mechanic named Kolya who is about to lose his house to a mayor who covets the land beneath it. Andrey Zvyagintsev builds this ruin with the patience of a man laying bricks in cold weather. The cast is entirely Russian, drawn from a homogeneous ethnic pool, and at no point does the film pause to consider who is or is not on screen. It is a story about power and property, told straight, with no casting agenda and no commentary on representation.

The women in this film fare poorly, and the film does not pretend otherwise. Lilya is a tragic figure, passed between men, and her death exists to complete Kolya's destruction. No gendered analysis is offered. No feminist framework is applied. The same restraint holds everywhere else. There are no LGBTQ characters. The town is white and the film never notices. The contested seaside land is a lever of corruption, not a climate parable. Nobody wrestles with body image or neurodivergence. The film has other concerns, and it pursues them without apology.

What the film does offer is a sour accounting of corrupt state power, a bishop who blesses the strong, and a mayor who drives off at the end in a luxury car that used to be somebody's home. This is anti-authoritarian anger, aimed at the machinery of a specific country, and it stops short of any modern thesis about wealth itself. The producer insisted the film never becomes a sermon or a public statement, and he was right. The critique arrives through tragedy, through vodka and grief, and it lands harder for never raising its voice.