Loosely based on Dante Alighieri's Divine Comedy, Liang’s documentary has been lauded for its surreal cinematography and poignant imagery.

Starting with an explosion on the desolate field in Inner Mongolia, Behemoth depicts a hellish large-scale landscape as a result from mining industry.

Accompanied by the traditional Tuvan throat singing, the narrator, who is depicted as a naked man with his back facing the viewer, lies in the scene of smoky mountain under the control of “Behemoth”.

The "guide", a man carrying a mirror reflecting the dead and the past, looks at the desolate mining field which used to be their beautiful home.

The film concludes by implying that workers and their activities are like the underlings of Behemoth, which itself is created by human beings for the desire for an illusory modern life that escapes the very people working to make it possible.

The cinematography is strongly symbolic and contains myriad allusions to Dante Alighieri's Divine Comedy, adopting both its character archetypes and general plot structure.

The film ends in a satirically mordant Paradise, the culmination of the coal-miner’s labor which supposedly validates their suffering, an uninhabited ghost city represented with the color grey.

The documentary has been banned in China for its critique of the coal-mining industry and Chinese government, but did receive critical approval in countries across the world.

However, the effectiveness of execution remains doubtful as depicted later in the film, in that the man carrying the mirror continues to step towards the predictable end of the whole-cycle mining activities.