First-time film director Andrei Zvyagintsev has made a name for himself with The Return. Unfortunately, more often than not, that name is Tarkovsky. There is some justification for the comparison, considering the last Russian debut to win the Golden Lion at the Venice Film Festival was Tarkovsky’s Ivan’s Childhood in 1962. Both films, as it happens, are quiet, mournful portraits as emotional as they are metaphysical. And, of course, both films portray the lives of boys young enough to initially find comfort in their mothers’ arms yet are eventually made inconsolable by the brutal intrusion of adult men. But Zvyagintsev is not aping Tarkovsky, so it’s time to find greater praise for a Russian director than this easy comparison. That so many critics are at a loss for words when it comes to reviewing The Return—and therefore too ready to let haphazard references do the work for them—is somewhat understandable. Although the silent hopelessness of Zvyagintsev’s film may make it feel utterly alien in New York, it does have its countrymen. And compared to some other Russian films (especiallythose by Tarkovsky), The Return is not poetic—it is a terse, uninterrupted narrative, an allegory of fathers and sons in post-Soviet Russia.

On the immediate surface of things, The Return is the story of two boys whose father returns after an unexplained 12-year absence to make up for lost time by taking them on a fishing trip. Intertitles scrawled in children’s copybook-script tell us that the film begins on a Sunday and ends on a Saturday, as though the film was a series of entries in the diary shared by 15 year-old Andrei and his 12-year-old brother Ivan. Andrei initially seeks his father’s affections, but Ivan remains reticent, deeply resentful of this stranger and the unearned intimacy expected by his demand to be called “Papa.” By Wednesday, elliptical threats designed to coerce obedience have given way to fits of rage, and the extremity of emotional viciousness makes physical violence seem all too possible. The scenes of domestic tension and release are unbearable and universal. Where other films use childhood to blandly signify idyllic innocence, The Return looks unflinchingly at the indignation of youth and the brutality of family.

The rare tenderness exchanged between father and sons is circumscribed by the strict conventions of this manliness: sharing a swig of alcohol from his flask, an occasional half-smile and pat on the shoulder. He seems to want to make up for lost time, but good (if unrealistic) intentions are frustrated by the difficulty of making men out of his boys. Ironically, he succeeds only in death, an ordeal from which these previously whiny and irresponsible children emerge quietly competent. But they end as fatherless as they began. They are left only with the snapshots of their trip and the possibility (discovered too late) that their father might have missed them as much as they did him. All unhappy families may be unhappy in their own unique way, but even the unhappiest families appear happy in faded snapshots, fodder for the selective memory of nostalgia.

The film’s use of biblical allusion is quietly subversive: it employs them so that it can invert them, turning religious symbolism on its head to an extent that comparisons to Tarkovsky seem nearly blasphemous. The first time the boys lay eyes on their father, he is fast asleep in their mother’s bed with the sheet draped over his middle, his peaceful face tilted to the side—looking very much like either a representation of the crucified Christ, if not for his corporeal, highly un-Christlike manliness. That evening, at their first meal together as a family, their father pours the wine and breaks the bread, and then proceeds to break a chicken carcass the same way, brutally offering fistfuls of baked bird to his frightened offspring. He is resurrected on Sunday, brought back to life and returned to his sons until he must be sacrificed again on Saturday. In the last scene of the film, the boys drive out of the frame, away from the sandy spot where the canoe containing their father’s mortal remains has sunk to the bottom of the lake. The camera lingers there for a moment, and then pulls back—as though the spirit of the dead man were there on the beach, surveying the landscape before retreating into the woods.

The Return turns on its head the parable of the prodigal son to give us a prodigal father—returned and repentant, but also omnipotent and unmerciful. This parable does not allow for a happy ending of forgiveness; the frightened, helpless sons have no such power to make their father stay. As such, the allegory of The Return is much more appropriate and timely for our post-Soviet age: like so many fathers of so many broken families, God himself is absent. And we are powerless to do anything but await his return.