‘Minotaur’ Review: Andrey Zvyagintsev’s Timeless, Domestic Epic is an Unflinching Look at Putin’s Russia [A] Cannes
The tales and lessons found within Greek mythology have struck a chord with audiences for centuries. The heroes and deities in these stories may not translate directly to a modern context, but the lessons and warnings found within make them resonate in any era. In the legend of the Minotaur, King Minos forced the Athenians to select fourteen citizens to be sacrificed to the half-man, half-beast who resided in a labyrinthine maze. The myth and future literary references to the creature address the themes of war and retribution, and highlight the inescapable fate of men damned for the violence at their core. Russian auteur Andrey Zvyagintsev’s astonishing new film, Minotaur, uses the cyclical, endless violence found within the myth and transposes it onto modern-day Russia. It’s an ancient tale told within a chilling, new context that poses an inevitable question. What kind of man is able to make it out of the minotaur’s elaborate maze alive? In the legend, that was impossible, but in a modern context, the answer is even more disturbing.
Zvyagintsev’s first film in nearly a decade begins with a chilly, observational quality, as if we’re watching a family trapped within a beautiful glass display case. In their Frank Lloyd Wright-inspired home with floor-to-ceiling windows that let in the austere autumnal light, Zvyagintsev’s camera follows each family member from room to room, showing the mastery that he has over the camera. As their dialogue drifts in and out, Minotaur feels like an Altman film made with cool precision and absent of his signature shagginess. The family within is a perfect representation of a type of Russian nouveau riche, with their gorgeous home situated at the end of a long driveway, seemingly removed from the rest of the world. Unhappily married Gleb (Dmitriy Mazurov) and Galina (Iris Lebedeva) live with their headphone-clad teenage son Seryozha (Boris Kudrin), and seem to be going through the motions in their marriage, attending dinners with his coworkers and their wives and girlfriends and living with a kind of privileged obliviousness to what’s happening in the world around them. At home, Galina slinks around their bedroom in silky nighties and lotions her legs in a way that is a hallmark of the women in the erotic thrillers of the ‘80s and ‘90s. Galina has a seductive quality, and with that comes a few secrets outside of their marriage. Gleb suspects Galina is having an affair and, soon, he discovers that she is, in fact, cheating on him with a young photographer, Anton (Yuriy Zavalnyouk).
Gleb may be focused on Galina’s new dalliance almost as a way to distract himself from the mounting pressure he’s facing at work. Gleb is the CEO of an import-export company that appears to have ties to shipping and manufacturing in an emerging military conflict. Zvyagintsev wisely sets Minotaur in 2022, when the country is at the beginning of the war with Ukraine. For the director, who now lives in France and shot the film in Latvia, it’s the perfect time to set his slow-burn thriller, as it emphasizes that violence and war are as baked into his native country’s DNA as they are in the Greek myths. Gleb has been losing a number of employees to a secret military operation at the border, and to make matters worse, the mayor has received word from Moscow that a quota of employees must be drafted for military service. Of course, Gleb and the other CEOs and executives will not be required to put themselves on that list. As a portrait of Putin hangs on the wall, the mayor tells Gleb that he must select a list of fourteen employees to be drafted by next Thursday. What’s unique about Gleb’s character and Mazurov’s performance is that he isn’t depicted as your typical fictional oligarch. Instead, Mazurov creates a character who, at first, feels as smooth as a Russian Don Draper before he’s quickly and completely controlled by his impulses and surroundings. He has a quietly evil way of selecting his employees, avoiding the decision himself and instead tasking his project manager, Natasha (Varvara Shmykova), to pull together a list of “sturdy, disciplined” men for an upcoming project. When the selected members come to the office, Zvyagintsev’s camera painfully pans around the table to show the faces of the unwitting who are about to be drafted. It’s a haunting, brilliant scene that’s also elevated by Mazurov’s controlled, deliberate performance. He doesn’t easily let us in on what’s haunting him, but he displays a kind of malaise that signals that it certainly isn’t the political violence on the horizon.
Zvyagintsev and co-writer Simon Lyashenko’s screenplay references a Greek myth in its structure and themes, and those allusions and connections create an eerie link to the past, with proof that men haven’t evolved when war is on the table. What makes Minotaur such a brilliant story, though, is that Zvyagintsev uses several historical portraits of violence to craft something that feels entirely fresh and startlingly relevant. The film is also a Russian-language remake of Claude Chabrol’s 1969 film The Unfaithful Wife, yet with a political twist that makes it feel far more expansive. This story of a man’s fears of what his wife is up to outside of their bedroom isn’t exactly new territory (Adrian Lyne also gifted audiences with the English-language remake Unfaithful in 2002), but with this adaptation, Zvyagintsev smartly proves that it is fertile ground for connecting the dots on who and what makes men go to war. Like his earlier films Leviathan and Loveless, Minotaur is interested in uncovering the uncertainty and pain at the center of a modern-day domestic partnership and what drives people to make decisions they may regret. What makes this film remarkable, though, is how it uses well-known templates without ever being obvious. For Zvyagintsev, intimate relationships have always proven to be a microcosm for the world at large, and Minotaur is undoubtedly his masterpiece.
Much like in Zvyagintsev’s previous films, the women in Minotaur hardly seem happy, especially when they’re trapped in the confines of their domestic lives. So when Galina visits the young, beautiful Anton in his high-rise studio that’s a far cry from home, the romantic ecstasy is a sharp contrast to the other side of her life. Lebedeva imbues Galina with the kind of sensuality and eroticism found in actresses like Greta Scacchi or Linda Fiorentino. Her vanity, much like Gleb’s ego, will have consequences, though, and returning cinematographer Mikail Krichman smartly captures Anton’s apartment with a chilly remove. This isn’t a lovebirds’ nest, but a scene that we’ll return to under far different circumstances. Much like The Unfaithful Wife and Unfaithful, the man caught in the crossfire of the affair has to meet a similarly devastating end. The nearly thirty-minute sequence that follows is chilling, as Zvyagintsev focuses on Gleb cleaning a crime scene with as much hellbent focus as Norman Bates in a similarly extended scene in Psycho. However, while it’s obvious that Gleb is capable of violence, Zvyagintsev and Mazurov make it clear that he’s pretty inept at cleaning up the mess. What’s brilliant about the scene, however, lies in its expertly walked tonal tightrope. There are moments of comedy to be sure, but it never once veers too far. Gleb looks pathetic, but Zvyagintsev wisely never crosses the line to turn it into a comedy of a hapless man. On the surface, the affair plot could seem like a fairly standard trope, and it certainly could be in the hands of another filmmaker, but Zvyagintsev is interested in how the personal is so often political. In Minotaur, the realization that political power and war are what save Gleb from his own vanity and personal failures is an absolute gut-punch.
What makes Minotaur feel revelatory is that, despite its familiar plotting and heavy themes, Zvyagintsev would rather focus on the quiet rather than the noise of personal and political war. The script also never defaults to the tempting, frustrating kind of didacticism frequently found in films that tackle the morally gray, with Evgueni and Sacha Galperine’s haunting score and the actors’ body language controlling the tone and mood. Yet when dialogue is used, it’s simple and powerful. Perhaps the single best lines of dialogue come from two detectives looking over a surveillance video. The proof of the face on the screen doesn’t matter, as their superiors have told the men to disregard it. “Why do we bother?” one man asks, before his colleague says, “Fuck if I know. Let’s have lunch.” Powerful, well-connected men will never be trapped in the maze of the minotaur, but floating miles above it, never to be forced to wander inside.
Grade: A
This review is from the 2026 Cannes Film Festival where Minotaur had its world premiere In Competition and won the Grand Prize. MUBI will distribute the film in U.S. theaters.
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