Leviathan (2014 film)
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Leviathan is a 2014 Russian drama film directed by Andrey Zvyagintsev, co-written by Zvyagintsev and Oleg Negin, and starring Aleksei Serebryakov, Elena Lyadova, and Vladimir Vdovichenkov. According to Zvyagintsev, the story of Marvin Heemeyer in the United States inspired him and it was adapted into a Russian setting.
Plot
Set in the fictional town of Pribrezhny (shot in the coastal town of Teriberka, Murmansk Oblast), Russia, the plot follows the tragic series of events that affect Kolya (Aleksei Serebryakov), a hotheaded car mechanic, his second wife Lilya (Elena Lyadova) and his teenage son, Roma (Sergey Pokhodyaev). The town's crooked Mayor Vadim (Roman Madyanov) has undertaken a legal plot to expropriate the land on which Kolya's house is built.
The mayor's plan is supposedly to build a telecommunications mast on Kolya's property, offering a grossly undervalued sum for compensation, although Kolya believes that his real plan is to build a villa for himself. Kolya's long-time friend Dima (Vladimir Vdovichenkov), a sharp and successful lawyer from Moscow, attempts to fight the expropriation through the local court system.
During the course of the trial, Kolya is arrested for shouting at corrupt police officers in a police station. When the trial rules in favor of the mayor, Dima manages to get him to step back, and to secure Kolya's release from jail, by threatening him with compromising documents. During Kolya's absence, Lilya engages in an impromptu sexual encounter with Dima.
During an outing with Kolya's friend Ivan Stepanich (Sergei Bachursky), Roma's friend witnesses Lilya and Dima having sex and Kolya, learning of the affair, assaults the couple. Meanwhile, Mayor Vadim visits his friend, a local Russian Orthodox Church bishop (Valeriy Grishko), for spiritual comfort, who tells him that all power comes from God and encourages him to solve his problems forcefully. Subsequently, Vadim and his thugs abduct Dima and carry out a mock execution, advising him to return to Moscow. Afterwards Vadim continues his drive to expropriate Kolya's house. The last appearance of Dima shows him looking out of the window of a train, ostensibly en route back to Moscow.
Lilya returns home to Kolya, but she is depressed by the public revelation of her affair. While the family is packing to move out, Roma catches Kolya and Lilya having sex in the basement and flees the house, collapsing in tears by a whale skeleton on the shore. He returns home late at night, and explicitly blames Lilya for everything that is going wrong in their lives.
That night, Lilya is unable to sleep and leaves the house in the early morning. She is shown walking near cliffs alone. The next morning she does not turn up at work and her phone is switched off. Her body is discovered a few days later. A mournful Kolya starts drinking even more and, meeting a priest, asks why God is doing this to him. The priest, who is a pious man, quotes from the Biblical book of Job, and counsels Kolya that, when Job accepted his fate, he was rewarded by God with a long and happy life.
The next day, Kolya is arrested. The police claim to have evidence that he raped Lilya and murdered her with a blow to the head, using a blunt object. Evidence against him includes his and Lilya's own friends' testimonies about threats he made to Lilya and Dima when he discovered their affair, and one of his shop hammers being shaped "similarly" to the wound in her head. Kolya is convicted of murder and sentenced to fifteen years in a maximum-security prison. With no family left, Roma reluctantly agrees to be taken in by Kolya's former friends, to avoid being sent to an orphanage. Mayor Vadim then receives a call informing him of Kolya's sentence, and he gloats and says that Kolya got what he deserved for having stood up against him.
In the end, Kolya's house is torn down and Mayor Vadim's project is revealed: a lavish church for his friend the bishop. The film concludes with a sermon by the bishop, with the mayor in attendance. The bishop extols the virtues of God's truth versus the world's truth, and says that good intentions do not excuse evil acts. He urges the congregation not to act with force or cunning, but to put their trust in Christ.
See also
- List of submissions to the 87th Academy Awards for Best Foreign Language Film
- List of Russian submissions for the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film
