Leviathan

A small town on the Barents Sea, in the far north of Russia. Kolya, a hot-tempered mechanic, lives with his young wife and teenage son in the house his family has owned for generations. The town's corrupt mayor wants the land, and the courts are on his side. Kolya calls in an old army friend, now a lawyer in Moscow, who arrives with a file of compromising material on the mayor. It seems like a fair fight. It isn't.

Andrey Zvyagintsev turns the story of Job into a modern Russian tragedy. Everything in the film is enormous: the grey sea, the rocks, the skeleton of a whale on the beach, the sense of a power so complete that resistance is almost absurd. Against this, the people are small, drinking vodka to survive, making terrible decisions. There is a strange black humour too, especially in a picnic scene where old portraits of Soviet leaders are used as shooting targets.

It is long, slow and bleak, and it gives you no comfort. The Russian state, the courts, the Orthodox Church: no institution comes out clean. The Russian culture ministry hated it, which tells you something. It won Best Screenplay at Cannes and the Golden Globe, and was nominated for the Oscar. A great, heavy, unforgettable film about how the powerful crush those who stand in the way.