Set in fictional town of Pribrezhny, Russia, Leviathan follows the tragic series of events that affect Kolya (Aleksei Serebryakov), a hotheaded car mechanic, his second wife Lilya (Elena Lyadova) and his teenage son, Roma (Sergey Pokhodyaev). The town's crooked Mayor Vadim (Roman Madyanov) has undertaken a legal plot to expropriate the land on which Kolya's house is built. Echoing the Biblical story of Job, Leviathan is a modern Russian classic.