For Russian writer-director Zvyagintsev, whose 2003 debut The Return deeply impressed, this is feature number four, though only his second to be seen here outside festivals.
Set and shot in a village on the Barents Sea coast in the northeast corner of Russia, it is punctuated by jaw-dropping exterior scenes, their effect magnified by a remarkably restrained Philip Glass score.
In the opening and closing sequences, mountainous waves rake a coastline littered with rotting skeletons of boats.
But most of the drama is terrifyingly intimate. Its main character is Kolia (Serebryakov), a village mechanic who lives on the edge of the harbour with his beautiful wife, Lilia (Lyadova), and his teenage son, Roma, (an excellent Pokhodaev), who looks on his dad with equal parts hurt, rage and adoration.
The family faces sudden eviction from their home under a compulsory acquisition order initiated by local mayor Vadim (Madyanov), abetted by a grotesquely compliant judicial system. In an early scene, which might have been scripted by Kafka, and which will have a chilling echo at the film's end, a judge reads a finding dismissing Kolia's appeal in a high-speed gabbling monotone without so much as raising her head to look at him.
