Leviafan is a tragic drama, compelling in its moral seriousness, with a severity and force that escalate into a terrible, annihilating sort of grandeur.
Zvyagintsev combines an Old Testament fable with something like Tarkovsky’s Sacrifice; it also has something of Elia Kazan’s On the Waterfront or Robert Rossen’s municipal graft classic All the King’s Men. Kolia is a car mechanic with a modest property on prime real estate: a beautiful spot on the Barents Sea, but a crooked mayor called Vadim – a wonderful performance from Roman Madyanov, looking something like Boris Yeltsin – wants this land, and hits Kolia with a compulsory purchase order…
Leviafan shows a world governed by drunken, depressed men: everyone is drowning in vodka and despair. Kolia is at the centre of a perfect storm of poisoned destiny, at the focal point of smart lawyers, aggressive politicians and arrogant priests. The title refers to Hobbes’s Leviathan, the classic work about liberty and the state, and also the whale. A Dostoyevskian-looking priest speaks to Kolia about enduring his trials like Job, submitting to God’s will, as mighty as the great beast of the sea: “Canst thou draw out Leviathan with a fish-hook?” Yet Kolia has become not Job, but the beached whale itself.

Peter Bradshaw, “The Guardian”, 7 November 2014

The arduous alliance between man and the state has been a theme of life in Russia for quite a long time. But if my film is rooted in the Russian land, it is only because I feel no kinship, no genetic link with anything else. Yet I am deeply convinced that, whatever society each and every one of us lives in, from the most developed to the most archaic, we will all be faced one day with the following alternative: either live as a slave or live as a free man. And if we naively think that there must be a kind of state power that can free us from that choice, we are seriously mistaken.
In the life of every man, there comes a time when one is faced with the system, with the “world”, and must stand up for his sense of justice, his sense of God on Earth. It is still possible today to ask these questions to the audience and to find a tragic hero in our land, a “son of God”, a character who has been tragic from time immemorial, and this is precisely the reason why my homeland isn’t lost yet to me, or to those who have made this film.

Andrey Zvyagintsev