Krzyżanowska Katarzyna, Andrey Zvyagintsev’s Leviathan: The Unbearable State of Nature

Leviathan, a 2014 movie directed by Andrey Zvyagintsev, is the tragic story of a man who suffers from the lack of a Hobbesian social contract. This widely appreciated cinematic masterpiece tells the story of a simple car mechanic, Kolya Sergeievich (played by the acclaimed movie star Aleksey Serebryakov), who leads an undisturbed life together with his beautiful wife Lilya (Elena Lyadova) and adorable son Roma (Sergey Pokhodaev) in a house on a spectacular cliff looking out to the Barents Sea. His precious prop-erty becomes the primary source of Kolya’s misery: the greedy mayor Vadim (Roman Madyanov) wants to place an unlawful embargo on Kolya’s house, a small auto-repair shop, and land in order to build yet another mansion for the Russian oligarchs there. According to the plot, set in contemporary corrupt Russia, from the beginning his efforts are doomed to end in total hopelessness. Zvyagintsev gives his audience universally understandable symbolic hints leading to the fatal...