The movie’s main character, a car mechanic called Kolya, has his life crushed by the mayor, a fictional and horrendously venal version of Ms. Trubilina. His wife, Lilya, kills herself. In between invariably hopeless clashes with officialdom and the Russian Orthodox Church, everyone swigs vodka and gets depressed.

“I cannot get my head around how anybody could make such a dishonest film,” complained Ms. Trubilina, facing a portrait of President Vladimir V. Putin hanging on her office wall. “It is an invented version of reality that does not exist.” Like many of the film’s critics in Russia, she views the director, Andrey Zvyagintsev, as a “traitor” intent on smearing Russia’s gains under Mr. Putin.

But Ms. Trubilina’s defensive fury at what she sees as unfair distortion is far out of step with the way many other residents feel. Nobody likes his or her home being portrayed as a sinkhole of misery, but many take comfort in the view that Teriberka, whatever its problems, is no worse than countless other places in Russia’s “glubinka,” as Russians call their vast hinterland — or, for that matter, America’s. It is a territory scorned by urbanites but also often celebrated, by the same urbanites, as the locus of authentic national identity.