When the Leviathan Devours

Law, Legitimacy, and the Experience of Sovereign Power

Abstract

This paper examines Andrey Zvyagintsev’s Leviathan (2014) through Thomas Hobbes’s theory of sovereignty, asking what film can reveal about political power that political theory alone cannot fully capture. Hobbes conceptualizes the sovereign as an overwhelming but necessary authority capable of transforming insecurity and conflict into order. Zvyagintsev’s film complicates this account by depicting a political system in which order and functioning institutions persist while protection, accountability, and justice collapse. Through its portrayal of bureaucratic legality, coercive state power, religious legitimation, dispossession, and the erosion of private life, Leviathan transforms sovereignty from an abstract political structure into a lived experience. Particular attention is given to the film’s use of institutional ritual, landscape, silence, humiliation, and the recurring Leviathan imagery to communicate the emotional consequences of domination. The paper argues that when sovereign authority becomes fused with corruption and moral complicity, the Hobbesian protector can become a predator. Film therefore reveals how political power operates not only through institutions and law, but through emotion, dignity, identity, and the narrowing of possibilities for meaningful resistance.