IN a town on the Barents Sea coast, Kolya, second wife Lilya and teenage son Roma, from deceased first wife, live in a timber house overlooking the sea. There is no tree visible in any direction. Nor too many weeds or blades of grass.

Spectacular rock formations all around partly offset those environmental inadequacies. The only apparent reason for the town’s existence is the fish cannery.

Local panjandrum Vadim wants to build a tourist resort on Kolya’s land. Kolya invites his lawyer brother Dimi to come from Moscow to contest Vadim’s application. On that dramatic framework, writer/director Andrey Zvyagintsev’s Oscar-nominated (foreign language) film hangs a brilliant, satirical cinematic parable about 21st-century Russia.

“Leviathan’s” excitement levels aren’t high, but its 140 minutes deliver a boredom-free ride through emotional highs and lows packed with subtle and clever humour as ordinary Russian folk ease the pain by consuming vodka as if it were water (why do you think they call it that?) and chain-smoking. The implied damage that those addictions cause to health and longevity is a metaphor for Russian attitudes toward staying alive – even after democratisation, life in Russia’s outback offers few other pleasures.

Civil court procedures get special attention, serious material that’s blisteringly funny. How common Russian folk view their country’s oligarchs gets a hefty comical serve. Vadim’s campaign to achieve a financial outcome of questionable merit achieves a pinnacle of corruption. The Orthodox Church plays its own corrupt game.

You’ve gotta admire a subtitled film that generates laughter while marvelling at people’s survival in that bleak place and leaving corruption free to thrive.

At Palace Electric.