Leo Tolstoy famously opened Anna Karenina with the aphorism that all happy families are alike, but each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way. To judge by his latest film, Andrey Zvyagintsev would beg to differ: In Loveless, the latest Oscar-nominated import from the Russian auteur, every unhappy family is alike, while happy families are nowhere to be seen at all. That bleak assessment of modern-day Russia lies at the heart of Zvyagintsev’s stark, often powerful vision in Loveless—yet it is also the source of the film’s shortcomings.

No one familiar with Zvyagintsev’s work should be surprised by the film’s gloom; over the past 15 years, Zvyagintsev has carefully built a reputation as the cinematic chronicler of Putin-era malaise. He first burst onto the scene with The Return in 2003, a Bible-tinged parable of fathers and sons, centering on the mysterious return of an absent patriarch. The film instantly earned Zvyagintsev comparisons to the late Andrei Tarkovsky and his brand of spiritual cinema, but his later films gradually moved toward more temporal concerns. Elena (2011) is a chilly Hitchcockian thriller that doubles as a searing look at class tensions in modern Moscow, probing the marriage between a working-class matron, cut straight from Soviet cloth, and her nouveau riche, Westernized oligarch husband. And 2014’s Leviathan was Zvyagintsev’s most pointedly political film yet: Transposing the book of Job to a desolate stretch of the Barents Sea, Zvyagintsev dramatizes the losing battle of a local mechanic against the scheming authorities intent on expropriating his land. One shot in particular may be the best encapsulation of Putin’s Russia yet put on film: a handshake between a local Orthodox bishop and a corrupt mayor, sealing an unholy alliance between church and state that is approvingly presided over by the President whose portrait hangs above.

There are traces of all these films throughout Loveless, which preserves the director’s spare and unsentimental style, his thematic interest in fractured families, and his sly critique of the contemporary Russian state. Yet Loveless may be the first film in which Zvyagintsev’s ambitions exceed his reach. As a rigorously controlled exercise in technique, or a moody tone poem about family breakdown, Loveless is effective enough. But when Zvyagintsev aims to pin a profound social statement on this material, he falters, and the strain shows.

On the face of it, Loveless is a straightforward domestic drama, focusing on the travails of a particularly unhappy Russian family. Zhenya (Maryana Spivak) and Boris (Aleksey Rozin) are a thirtysomething couple on the verge of divorce, seeing other people when apart and squabbling whenever together, each trying to foist the custody of their 12-year-old son Alyosha (Matvey Novikov) on the other. From the start, it is clear that their parental relationship is as loveless as their marriage: Boris shows no interest in Alyosha, while Zhenya casually berates and belittles him, even in front of strangers. Both parents are too caught up in their mutual loathing (and in Zhenya’s case, her smartphone) to pay any mind to the silent, solitary Alyosha, who is himself something of an enigma.

Zvyagintsev’s film is structured around Alyosha’s absence: his literal absence, eventually, since the child soon disappears into thin air, forcing his parents to reluctantly join forces in an attempt to find him. Yet even when physically present in the early scenes, Alyosha barely registers as an individual. This is not a fault so much as a deliberate distancing strategy on Zvyagintsev’s part, designed to highlight Alyosha’s isolation from the social fabric in which he is ostensibly embedded. He hardly speaks a word in the whole film, casting angry or fearful glances at his parents but rarely articulating his feelings aloud. We get only a vague glimpse of his private life in the winding, woodside road he takes on the way back from school, where he hides discarded trinkets in the base of a tree and hoists a long piece of discarded tape on a branch like a banner, denoting his private sanctum. Within the apartment, Zvyagintsev’s compositions serve to isolate Alyosha: TV screens and iPhones compete for his mother’s attention, and in one haunting image, she slams a door and enters the hallway to scream at her husband, while Alyosha—hidden from her view, but visible to us—lets out a silent, primal howl of anguish.

Maryana Spivak as Zhenya and Matvey Novikov as Alexey
© Anna Matveeva – Non-Stop Production, Courtesy of Sony Pictures Classics

These early stretches are as accomplished as anything in Zvyagintsev’s oeuvre, working as harrowing drama and showcasing his consummate command of craft and mood. Yet the film’s limitations are foretold here as well. Alyosha is not the only cipher in the film; virtually all the film’s characters are not human beings so much as avatars for various social pathologies. Zvyagintsev clearly sees in this broken family a larger disease ailing modern Russia, which he gradually teases out as the film unfolds.

The scenes at Boris’s workplace are a case in point. Boris works at what looks like a sleekly modern sales company, but we soon learn that the big boss is a devout (and domineering) Orthodox Christian who insists that his employees adhere to his own moral codes, including a prohibition on divorce, on pain of being fired. When Boris confides in a colleague about his marital troubles and the looming divorce, he is told that he can fool the boss by simply hiring actors to play his family, as another co-worker did at a past Christmas party.

It is easy to see in this scene Zvyagintsev’s indictment of the hollow religiosity emanating from the Russian state. The social contract of the workplace, he suggests, is fraudulent, based on a simulacrum of piety enforced from the top down. And the ultimate outcome is alienation, an environment where workers walk on eggshells to avoid publicly transgressing the tenets of a faith they do not actually believe. Zvyagintsev, always a master of unease, conjures the workplace ennui in cinematic terms, holding an uncomfortably long take in the elevator where each worker stares ahead silently, each an atomized drone rather than members of a healthy community.

Where Boris must affect religious observance to keep his job, Zhenya’s work imposes no such demands. A hair salon manager who spends much of her screen time getting spa treatments and snapping selfies, Zhenya is a creature of pure narcissism who carries on with an older man and seems to lust after his upscale apartment as much as the man himself. In this she is not alone: the film’s margins are populated with similarly attractive and self-absorbed young women, who revel in their own beauty and, in one amusing scene, toast “To love and selfies” at a posh restaurant. These are the two options for coping with the deprivations of contemporary Russian life, Loveless seems to be saying: either a dishonest embrace of “traditional values” or a decadent, postmodern materialism.

That is not such a bad insight in itself. The problem is that Loveless fails to develop it much further, instead issuing endless variations on the same theme by filling the screen with proxy Borises and Zhenyas. When we meet Zhenya’s estranged mother, for instance, we quickly learn that the apple did not fall far from the tree: She is a nasty piece of work, as casually cruel to her daughter as Zhenya is to her son. There is a point here, about parents handing on misery to their offspring, but it is an obvious and familiar one, made only more so through repetition.

The same holds for the film’s depiction of romance and sex, which is invariably sordid. Both parents carry on affairs that seem as doomed to fail as their marriage. Boris’s pregnant mistress, the childlike Masha, fawns over him in ways that plainly grate; Zhenya is wined and dined by Anton, an elegant older man who by film’s end already seems to tire of her. All unhappy families are alike, indeed: in the world of Loveless, men are inevitably oversexed and immature, constantly pursuing the pleasures of the flesh; women are flighty and naïve, pinning their hopes for happiness on older men; while mothers are hardened and callous.

And children, invariably, are lost: neglected, abandoned, ignored, disdained. In the film’s context, Alyosha is just one casualty of a society that fails to care for its children. In their quest to find him, his parents encounter more such casualties: one 12-year-old runaway who waits unclaimed at the local hospital, another whose disfigured body is presented to Alyosha’s parents at the morgue. The latter scene is a particularly harrowing one, in which the parents are faced with an ugly reality they would prefer to ignore. The child on the slab is not Alyosha, but he might as well be, and the sight causes Zhenya, uncharacteristically, to break into open weeping. A woman who had casually voiced regrets about not aborting her child is here confronted with a dead child in all its gruesome reality, and only wants to look away.

Aleksey Rozin as Boris
© Anna Matveeva – Non-Stop Production, Courtesy of Sony Pictures Classics

It hardly counts as a spoiler to reveal that Loveless comes to no tidy resolution. Like Antonioni’s classic L’avventura, which surely served as an influence, this is a film about a character’s disappearance that frustrates the audience’s wish for answers, instead using that plot device to explore how others move on in his absence. They do so all too readily. By film’s end, Alyosha’s room is being renovated, his possessions taken away, as the camera sadly tracks forward to look out the window at the wintry landscape he once gazed upon. And a film that began in 2012, with rumblings about the Mayan apocalypse on Boris’s car radio, ends in 2014 with its protagonists looped in to a Kremlin echo chamber, vacantly tuning in as Dmitry Kiselyov rants on Russian television about the war in Ukraine. One of the final shots aims to pithily encapsulate the state of the nation, as Zvyagintsev sees it: Zhenya, suited up in a bright Team Russia tracksuit produced for the Sochi Olympics, running on a treadmill on her balcony, staring straight ahead and going nowhere fast.

As to the impact of that scene, well, your mileage may vary: It is at once a clever visual metaphor for Russia’s dead-end future and a little too obvious. Much of Loveless is like that: Zvyagintsev has a clear talent for embedding social themes into his narrative, but the ideas themselves are familiar and well-worn. So, too often, are the cinematic tropes he uses to realize them. Loveless is far too enamored of dimly lit shots of industrial decay or ravaged landscapes. Few can compose such shots as beautifully as Zvyagintsev, but when used so frequently, they come to seem like an artistic crutch, deployed to conjure a dreary mood but ultimately conducing to ponderousness.

It may be that Zvyagintsev’s reputation has finally caught up with him, that he feels burdened by his status as the profound cinematic truth-teller (and doomsayer) of today’s Russia. Zvyagintsev has always been an uneasy representative of his homeland. His films are resented and repressed at home—Leviathan was partly censored for its domestic release and denounced by the Minister of Culture, while Loveless was made without state support—but released to rapturous reception abroad. The filmmaker plays a complicated double game to stay in the business, earning Western plaudits for his underhanded critique of modern Russia while rejecting political labels and insisting that his concerns are universal, so as not to fall too foul of the authorities. That dynamic has dogged the director on the film’s foreign press tour. In an interview with The Guardian, he pointedly rejected the “dissident” label and mused that he was “more like a clown.” And in a profile by the Financial Times, Zvyagintsev disclaimed any political messaging: “I didn’t have the objective to criticize the state in this film. It was not at all what I was going for.”

The state, for its part, has seen little reason to criticize Zvyagintsev this time around. Whereas Leviathan riled up conservative passions and precipitated a new law against films that “defile” Russia’s national culture or “threaten national unity,” Loveless has been warmly received. Prime Minister Medvedev sent his regards when the film won the Jury Prize at Cannes, praising Loveless as a “film that poignantly and honestly tells a family history with its difficult relations, feelings and emotions that concern everyone.”

Director Andrey Zvyagintsev
© Anna Matveeva – Non-Stop Production, Courtesy of Sony Pictures Classics

One could endlessly debate whether Zvyagintsev is pulling his punches in Loveless, making a more muted criticism of the Putin regime either due to a general sense of self-preservation or an actual threat of censure by the state. In an era when the authorities can arrest a celebrated film director on trumped-up charges, the latter possibility is not so far-fetched. And if Zvyagintsev made some slight, discretionary compromises to preserve the best of his art and still maintain an audience at home, he would hardly be the first. (Aleksandr Pushkin, Mikhail Bulgakov, and Boris Pasternak would certainly understand.)

On the other hand, the film does not feel obviously compromised. Its critical subtext, whatever you think of it, is unmissable—I came away believing that the filmmaker had said everything he meant to say. And for his part, Zvyagintsev has insisted that he exercised no self-censorship. He has pointed out that his reliance on foreign funding for Loveless made him, if anything, less subject to the whims of national censors than when making his previous films, which were partly financed by the Ministry of Culture. If Loveless is less politically incendiary than Leviathan, more focused on widely applicable themes of family crisis, it may simply be because that is the story Zvyagintsev wanted to tell at this moment.

Whatever Zvyagintsev’s motivations, it seems clear that Loveless was more warmly received by the authorities than Leviathan precisely because it lacks the earlier film’s gut-punch honesty about Russia specifically. The social critiques leveled in Loveless, with few exceptions, could apply to any other modern country that suffers from frayed families and empty sex and social media-engendered isolation. The same cannot be said of Leviathan, which is laser-focused on the maladies of contemporary Russia. In Loveless, Zvyagintsev wants to have it both ways. The film is vague enough that Russians can read it as a general statement about family breakdown in the modern world, and not be perturbed. But it has enough specifically Russian reference points that naive Westerners can perceive it as some definitive statement about The Way Russians Live Now and how terribly bleak things are over there. As Andrei Kartashov put it in a review at MUBI, “For foreign audiences, Russia is a country that is always in the news but remains obscure, and a film that claims to explain everything in two hours is consequently as welcome as a Lonely Planet guide.”

Deftly though it tries, Loveless ultimately fails to sustain this balancing act. Zvyaginstev’s first film (The Return) is more emotionally resonant and richer in its portrait of the human condition; his previous one (Leviathan) is a more fully realized indictment of the Russian state. Loveless sits uneasily between these two, aspiring to be both a searing human drama and a trenchant commentary on Russian life, and fulfills neither mandate completely.

Regardless, Zvyagintsev’s weaker efforts are more interesting than most filmmakers’ best ones. And if he wins the Oscar for Best Foreign Language Film come Sunday, he will surely be generously funded to make many more films. He could even regain the financial favor of the Russian state, which warmed to his latest offering and is eager to trumpet the achievements of its artists abroad.

If it happens, a win would present a bitter irony for Russia itself: a confirmation of Russia’s capacity to produce world-renowned filmmakers, yes—but also a confirmation that the bleak, despairing view of the country Zvyagintsev offers is all too plausible to the rest of the world.