Russian master Andrey Zvyagintsev, who made the powerful, Oscar®-nominated Leviathan (PSIFF 2015), takes another devastating look at the soul of contemporary Russia. It begins at the tail end of a failed marriage. Boris and Zhenya still share a Moscow apartment as they await their divorce, but they have both taken up with new partners: he with a young and already pregnant lover, she with a wealthy middle-aged man. They are so absorbed in their own enmity that they at first fail to notice that their unhappy 12-year-old son has gone missing. Has he run away, or been kidnapped? Loveless may take the form of a police procedural, but its scope expands to paint a lacerating portrait of a wealth- and status-obsessed society, mired in cynicism and divorced from empathy. Infused with suspense and dread, the movie, as critic Peter Bradshaw wrote in The Guardian, “has a hypnotic intensity, which is maintained until the very end.” Winner: Jury Prize, Cannes; Best International Film, Munich

In competition for the FIPRESCI Prize.