Given the resounding success of Zvyagintsev’s daring amalgamation of current events and Biblical parable, I wanted to look closely at the way the film’s constituent parts function together, and also to examine briefly its immediate socio-political context, which may not be readily accessible to audiences outside of Russia.

It so happened that a few weeks ago I co-moderated a post-screening discussion of “Leviathan” in a theater in suburban New Jersey. A very solid (and solidly American) audience was very much interested in finding out whether “he did it or not.” (Just who did or didn’t do what I will not say for fear of a spoiler.)

I expect that Russian audiences—if and when they get to see the film—will not be of two minds on the question of the accused’s innocence. As Andrei Zvyagintsev reminded me when we met in New York during his recent U.S. press tour, “some thirty percent of Russia’s prisoners are entrepreneurs of various kinds, who got “fixed”—either by their competitors or by the government. They simply disappear. There is no recourse for these people. The most prominent example, of course, was Khodorkovsky.”

He might have also mentioned Alexei Navalnyi, an inveterate Putin scourge and anti-corruption activist, who is currently facing a ten-year sentence on allegations that his company overcharged a client (something even the client denies), or the two girls from the punk-band Pussy Riot, who spent two years in a prison camp for “hooliganism.”

As it happens, Pussy Riot do make a split-second appearance in the film by way of spray-painted graffiti on a partly-obscured TV newsreel. And they receive an even more oblique mention towards the end, in a sermon delivered to a church full of unrepentant wheelers and dealers, whose message is: we are the church, ours is the truth, our prayers get answered, not those of blasphemers capering about the altar. The last bit is a reference to Pussy Riot’s “punk prayer” performance (“Mother of God, drive Putin away!”), which ultimately landed them behind bars. While Russian audiences are far better equipped to pick up on such subtleties than their New Jersey counterparts, I suspect they will be equally hard-pressed to say what the film’s many allusions, elisions and suggestive symbolism ultimately amount to.