In 2008, the Russian director Andrey Zvyagintsev was in Manhattan shooting a chapter of the anthology film “New York, I Love You,” when he heard the story of an auto-repair shop owner in Colorado who had demolished the town hall and a former mayor’s house with an armored bulldozer after losing a zoning dispute. From that American seed has sprung “Leviathan,” a quintessentially Russian tragedy suffused with political and religious overtones.

“It was what this guy did, protesting against injustice, that impressed me most of all,” Mr. Zvyagintsev (pronounced ZVYA-ghin-tsev) said in an interview while in New York last month to promote “Leviathan,” which opens on Christmas Day. “My first feeling was, ‘Wow, what an amazing story, I absolutely need to do something with this.' ”

His screenwriting partner, Oleg Negin, initially resisted, arguing, as Mr. Zvyagintsev recalled, that “this is an American story, why would we want this?” But as other influences drawn from the director’s reading made themselves felt — Heinrich von Kleist’s novella “Michael Kohlhaas,” the biblical Book of Job and, after the film already had its name, Hobbes’s treatise on the nature of the social contract — the specifically Russian characteristics of the movie’s story began to emerge.

The main character in “Leviathan” is Nikolai, who runs an auto-repair shop next to the house where he lives with his young wife and teenage son in a dead-end fishing village on the shores of the Arctic Ocean. The mayor wants that land and uses his power to try to force the family out, and when Nikolai resists, the resulting series of events crushes him and those trying to help him.