Leviathan

Russian Andrey Zvyagintsev’s latest work, Leviathan (2014) is a modern day fable based on two sources: the Book of Job and the Thomas Hobbes’ 1651 treatise of the same name. It is a story of the sufferings of Kolya (Alexey Serebryakov), a small town mechanic living in a small coastal village-a setting that is bleak, desolate, foreboding, and at times spectacular. Admittedly, the losses of Koyla begin with loss of his house to a corrupt public official and become more personal and devastating as the film progresses. There are some great cinematic sequences throughout for example, the scene above where Koyla's son goes out and meditates on the remains of the Leviathan and the scene where the boy's mother sees the Leviathan swimming in the ocean.  Others include filming a scene where Koyla's old army friend and lawyer from Moscow is savagely beaten-it is filmed from inside a car with loud music playing to muffle the brutality. Near the end of the film, a local religious leader preaches, “Freedom is knowing God’s truth,” to which Hobbes might have respond, “Hell is truth seen too late.”  “Leviathan” was the book in which Hobbes famously suggested that an ideal government would protects citizens from lives that are “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short.” Zvyagintsev’s version questions how long a man can go on believing in a system that offers no hope.