On the outskirts of a small coastal town in the Barents Sea, where whales sometimes come to its bay, lives an ordinary family: Nikolai (Aleksey Serebryakov), his wife Lilya (Elena Lyadova) and their teenage son Romka. The family is haunted by a local corrupted mayor (Roman Madyanov), who is trying to take away the land, a house and a small auto repair shop from Nikolai. To save their homes Nikolai calls his old Army friend in Moscow (Vladimir Vdovichenkov), who has now become an authoritative attorney. Together they decide to fight back and collect dirt on the mayor.

„With the film's magisterial opening — the coastal landscape of the Barents Sea, set to the clarion call of Philip Glass's symphonic score — Zvyagintsev sets the stage for a story in which human intrigues are indistinguishable from forces of nature. Zvyagintsev has already been called a successor to Tarkovsky; with Leviathan he forges ahead and stakes out a cinematic territory of his own, analyzing the human (and, implicitly, Russian) spirit with an immediacy and urgency that will bear repeated viewings for decades to come.”