On how Andrei Zvyagintsev's Leviathan (2014) uses the Russian landscape.

Leviathan is a film about a man fighting the local government's attempt to seize his property on the coast of the Kola Peninsula in northern Russia. It's also an allegory for the relationship between individuals, the state, and the church in contemporary Russia, and it uses the landscape as an argument about all of these simultaneously.

The Russian Arctic coast that Zvyagintsev films is a landscape of an extraordinary kind of bleakness: it is also beautiful in a way that makes the bleakness more acute. The bones of a beached whale that become a recurring image are not symbols in any simple sense — they are the landscape's honest self-description.

The film was banned in Russia, received a Golden Globe for Best Foreign Language Film, and provoked official Russian statements about its political bias. These responses are the film's most precise critical reception: it made the people it was depicting uncomfortable enough to respond.

What Zvyagintsev achieves in Leviathan that most political films don't: the film is as formally interested in the landscape as in the allegory, and the landscape's indifference to human politics is the film's most honest political statement.