Minotaur

It is impossible to engage with Andrey Zvyagintsev’s newest feature Minotaur without encountering the man behind the camera through the lens of his personal tribulations and circumstances. It is his first film in nine years, and therefore his first since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. It was made in exile from Russia and arrives at Cannes with the symbolic significance of a major Russian anti-war film, not to mention the reputation he built with Leviathan and Loveless. But this blurring of artist and artwork creates a halo effect around Minotaur, one that can make the film seem deeper than it ultimately is.

The Cannes Grand Prix winner follows a provincial Russian oligarch Gleb (Dmitriy Mazurov), who at the outset appears to have it all: a beautiful wife, Galina (Iris Lebedeva), a pre-teen son (Boris Kudrin) whom he teaches how to stand up to bullies with an unusual level of sincerity, and a thriving company. But the image begins to shatter when he discovers his wife’s infidelity. At the same time, he faces pressure from the Russian government to provide a list of non-essential personnel from his company, men he can stomach sacrificing to Russia’s brutal war without disrupting his own business. One cannot help but think of Minotaur as something like an anti-Schindler’s List.

At heart, Minotaur remains surprisingly close to the mechanics of Claude Chabrol’s erotic thriller The Unfaithful Wife (La Femme Infidele), transposed into contemporary Russia and furnished with the political realities of wartime mobilisation. Inspired by Chabrol’s film rather than simply remaking it, Zvyagintsev uses the framework of marital betrayal to explore broader questions of power, complicity and self-preservation. As Gleb’s personal crisis deepens, his private actions become increasingly entangled with the moral compromises demanded by the wartime state, linking domestic drama to political allegory in ways that are often intriguing, if not especially surprising.

Zvyagintsev handles this material with his familiar control: psychological realism, cold visual restraint and an aversion to overt flourish. Once, that aesthetic carried a particular severity. Today, after years of prestige television drawing from the same vocabulary of desaturated overcast moods and minimalist solemnity, it no longer feels quite as distinctive. The film is never careless, but neither does its restraint always deepen the material. Too often, it dignifies what is, at the level of plot, a fairly conventional neo-noir.

Its political significance far exceeds its dramatic invention. In Greek mythology, the Minotaur was a half-man, half-bull creature confined within a labyrinth and sustained through the sacrifice of Athenian youths. Zvyagintsev’s allegory is clear enough: Gleb becomes a modern Russian Minotaur, sustaining his position through a series of human sacrifices. The men he places on the draft list are expendable. His wife's lover is expendable. Even the head of security who helps conceal his crimes ultimately becomes expendable. Everyone around him is reduced to a resource that can be redirected, sacrificed, or erased.

That is a strong metaphor, but it is also one the film keeps proving rather than complicating. Once Gleb’s logic of self-preservation is established, each new development confirms the same thesis: oligarchic power corrodes the private soul just as the state corrodes public life. The two strands of the film, marital betrayal and wartime mobilisation, do eventually weave toward a respectable ending, but Minotaur never fully escapes the gravity of its own conventionality.

The tragedy of Minotaur is that its central metaphor proves more compelling than the drama built around it. Like the creature of Greek myth, Gleb devours those who enter his orbit. Unlike the Minotaur, however, he is not trapped inside the labyrinth. He owns it.

Reviewed on: 04 Jun 2026