Starring Aleksay Serebryakov. In Russian, with English subtitles. Rated PG.

Leviathan is the Old Testament name given to a mythical sea monster; as numerous filmmakers have appreciated, it has since come to mean anything bigger than ourselves. In this particular movie of the same name—which deservedly won the Golden Globe for best foreign film and is nominated for an Oscar in that category—the wrath-packed part of the Bible also offers the story of Job as a template for all the bad shit that falls upon one hapless, if far from innocent, soul.

Played by Aleksey Serebryakov, the ginger-haired Nikolai (aka Kolia) is an auto mechanic and all-round handyman who’s just slightly better off than the other hard-drinking residents of a worn-out fishing village near Murmansk, inside the Arctic Circle, where Russia meets Finland and Norway. His pretty, increasingly neglected wife, Lilya (Elena Lyadova), works at one of the few canneries still open. Preteen son Roma (Sergey Pokhodaev) admires his dad, even while fearing his macho, melodramatic bullying.

The family has a ramshackle house right in the nicest spot on a fiord leading into town. And that’s enough to prompt the local big man (Roman Madyanov) to throw his weight around. As mayor, he has exploited a loophole to seize Nicolai’s property, offering a paltry buyout to make it legal. This development brings a visit from Nicolai’s old army buddy Dmitriy (Vladimir Vdovichenkov), now a hotshot Moscow lawyer who thinks they can still work the system. Maybe.

If you think the judge’s breathless reading of her rammed-through verdict is a comic exaggeration, check out footage of the Pussy Riot show trial. As in that real-life travesty, ham-fisted officials are here seen in cahoots with Orthodox clergy, who give Putin-esque plutocrats a kindly mask of populism to replace the fake optimism Communists relied upon to exert power.

The stymied Dmitriy moves to Plan B, pulling out dirt on the corpulent mayor to get him to back off. But despite his appearance of sleek professionalism, the handsome Muscovite can’t quite rein in his own whale-size ambitions, regarding the law, money, or Kolia’s family.

If this all sounds rather dark, it is. But in his most accessible movie yet, writer-director Andrey Zvyagintsev justifies the film’s Tarkovsky-like 140-minute length with ever-shifting events that pile up so relentlessly they move from tragic to absurd. (And you’ve never seen people have less fun drinking vodka.) The actors are all larger than life, but their characters must appear laughably small to the ancient stones and pounding waves that dominate the film’s bookends, with Philip Glass’s whirlpool music somehow making them disappear into a timeless landscape of prebiblical fate.