Andrey Zvyagintsev nearly died and then came back to life in 2021 amid COVID complications, but unlike another Cannes filmmaker who resurrected from near-death only to make bad art, the Russian auteur’s riveting comeback “Minotaur” is not only a return to form — it’s also exactly the kind of hopeless, coldly gazing, and politically indicting film only the director of “Leviathan” and “Loveless” could ever make.
Based on Claude Chabrol’s 1969 erotic thriller “The Unfaithful Wife,” which itself inspired Adrian Lyne’s deliciously lurid adaptation “Unfaithful” with Diane Lane in 2022, “Minotaur” follows a feckless, selfish man down a dark rabbit hole of his own digging amid the news that his wife is having an affair. We’ve seen this story before, and we know where it’s going. But Zvyagintsev, with a camera as still and gimlet-eyed as the Sphinx except when it’s gliding through the saddest rooms in the world like a seeking serpent, delivers an outcome and a movie more hopeless and on-brand than you could’ve dreamed of. His screenplay, co-written by Simon Lyashenko, is as tight as a drum, or as a rug you wrap up a dead body inside.
Even without knowing the plot of Chabrol’s or Lyne’s film, you know everybody is doomed to their own resigned lot in life when you’re in a Zvyagintsev picture, the same director who tore an already estranged couple apart with the disappearance of their son in “Loveless,” only for the boy never to be found because, well, that’s life under Mother Russia.
But in the Russia of “Minotaur,” which was actually shot in Latvia because the days of shooting politically trenchant material in Russia are done, Gleb Morozov (Dmitriy Mazurov) is the CEO of a shipping company. He lives in a Russian suburb, ensconced from life’s daily horrors, in a modernist home made of glass, steel, fine wood, and concrete. It’s autumn 2022, and Russia is mobilizing into Ukraine, with the town’s mayor mandating that Gleb assemble a list of his employees to be drafted into service. Videos of bombings, meanwhile, are entering people’s social media feeds.
Life at home for his wife Galina (Iris Lebedeva) is an empty chain of days; she’s an unemployed housewife whose existence revolves around getting their son Seriosha (Boris Kudrin) to school on time. A woman for whom getting the right presents and ordering the right food for his birthday party is a full-time job to fill the vacant space of a day. But as “Minotaur” quite quickly reveals, she’s having an affair with a 33-year-old photographer, Anton (Yuriy Zavalnyouk), whom she visits almost daily under the guise of yet another appointment. It’s something to live for, a thrilling escape from a miserable life of staring into the void, waiting for her husband and son to come home.
Lebedeva, who is astonishing here, feels less like a doomed Chabrol heroine than someone cut out of Antonioni. A forcefield of ennui and an elegant trenchcoat around her, and with the furtive glee that comes with having a secret, she makes her way a few times a week down the road to her assignations with a younger, virile artist in the sort of apartment where a woman as beautiful and rich as this would ordinarily never deign to be.
It’s no secret to the audience that Gleb, who has a history of infidelity and jealousy, is going to find out what she’s up to, nor is it a shock how he reacts. It’s mildly frustrating that Zvyagintsev, for his first film in nine years and after a brush with death, chose material that is very much familiar to his already savvy cinephile audience.
But the thrill of “Minotaur” is in how the filmmaker repositions the inevitable violence wrought from being cuckolded, the stuff we recognize from classic noir movies, into the political context of life in Russia amid its invasion into Ukraine. Imagine a Hitchcock thriller situated in the saddest, crummiest, most totalitarian corners of our times — and with an unfliching camera that offers no reassurance — and you’ll have some idea of just how bleak this unfeeling movie can get.
Mikhail Krichman, cinematographer on all Zvyagintsev’s films, returns on “Minotaur” with a glacial, widescreen gaze that encourages the viewer to examine everything around them. There’s a hypnotizing 360-shot that starts with Galina and Anton day-drinking and then getting into bed, with composers Evgueni and Sacha Galperine’s worrying score pressing upon them, only to come back to the pair in an unchanged, postcoital position. But they can’t stop what’s coming to them, which is nothing good. Zvyagintsev loves a red herring almost as much as a cosmically depressing visual joke, like the tiny picture of Putin hanging over a boardroom. Or the detectives who eventually show up at Gleb and Galina’s house, only to later look at some serious hard evidence that could solve their wild goose case and instead think, eh, let’s just go to lunch. Or this film’s last shot, which does not leave the viewer in an easy state of mind despite the comforting falsities that its characters embrace as they float above it all.
Zvyagintsev’s latest film, like all of his others from the fraught father-son journey of “The Return” to the slinking, snaky noir of “Elena,” is devoid of easy resolution, least of all hope. It may feel too familiar to those who have followed this filmmaker’s work closely, but “Minotaur” is capable of crushing you with its final suite of images that refuse to let you forget that the world we are living in is hell.
The actors are exquisite, transcending whatever allegorical mouthpieces you might read into them as, like when Lebedeva’s Galina, absolutely wasted after not hearing back from Anton for at least 24 hours and then drinking an entire bottle of wine at a bar, berates her son and husband for ordering the same old shit for dinner every night when she’s not cooking. Margherita pizza, margherita pizza. “Where is me?” she yells at the husband she feels nothing for. The husband who has been instructing their son how to bash in the faces of bullies who come at him at school.
“Minotaur” isn’t the best movie of Zvyagintsev’s career, but the icily exacting power of his filmmaking is undeniable — and it sucks you in like a vortex. Rarely are you so glued to a tale you’ve heard so many times before. Andrey Zvyagintsev, welcome back. We missed, and we need you.
Grade: A-
“Minotaur” premiered at the 2026 Cannes Film Festival. Mubi will release the film later this year.
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