Starring Maryana Spivak. In Russian, with English subtitles. Rated 14A

The title has more than one meaning, but Loveless is triggered by the harrowing situation in which 12-year-old Alyosha (Matvey Novikov) finds himself. Parents Zhenya (Maryana Spivak) and Boris (Aleksey Rozin) are locked in a particularly spiteful divorce, made worse by squabbling over the boy; they each want the other to take him. Sending him to a state institution is okay too!

Alyosha overhears all this between his parents’ attempts to sell their spacious apartment in a Moscow suburb, featureless apart from being near a wooded area as inviting as something in the Brothers Grimm. Both alleged adults are already knee-deep in other relationships. Salon owner Zhenya is with a wealthy entrepreneur (Andris Keishs) who so far hasn’t looked past her still-youthful beauty to the bitter vacuity beneath. And Boris has hooked up with, and knocked up, a mousy nobody (Marina Vasilyeva) who admires him for no visible reason. He’s a desk jockey at an unspecified corporation run by a Christian fundamentalist who only employs married people, giving rise to rare comic relief as our bearded bro tries to suss out how long a divorced dude can survive in that company.

While the parents are preoccupied with creating slightly modified versions of the problems they already have, their son runs out the front door one morning but doesn’t go to school. They’re eventually forced to team up and look for the boy, but even that doesn’t draw them closer. The police aren’t much help, although a volunteer-run kid-searching group provides a sense of community obviously lacking in a bleak, post-Soviet society that offers few fairy tales.

Set in 2012, when Mitt Romney was running against Barack Obama and the buildup to the annexation of Crimea was underway, this metaphor-laden tale is the latest from writer-director Andrey Zvyagintsev, who went similarly allegorical with his Oscar-winning Leviathan. Here we see no attempts to turn the massive ship of state around, just dull inching forward in “the proud land of Pushkin and Putin”, as one oily radio announcer puts it.

At more than two hours, the film itself feels unnecessarily laboured, and the ending, with one principal on a treadmill, staring down the audience while wearing a tracksuit that says RUSSIA in big red letters, is beyond obvious. Still, if Loveless is hard to love, neither is it easy to forget.