Minotaur Is Andrey Zvyagintsev's Ice-Cold Reckoning with Russia's Moral Rot

Nine years is a long time to wait for a filmmaker of Andrey Zvyagintsev's stature to return. His absence from screens—primarily due to a near-fatal battle with COVID-19 that resulted in hospitalization and temporary paralysis—felt like a wound that the film industry didn't quite know how to heal. But with Minotaur, his long-awaited comeback at the 79th Cannes Film Festival, Zvyagintsev makes it abundantly clear that the wait was worth every excruciating moment. The film is the work of an artist who stared down death, relocated to France, and came back with something cold, precise, and absolutely essential.

Shot in Latvia and presented as a French-German-Latvian co-production, Minotaur is, on its surface, a loose remake of Claude Chabrol's 1969 erotic thriller La Femme Infidèle—a film that has itself inspired more than one retelling, including Adrian Lyne's 2002 Unfaithful with Diane Lane. But Zvyagintsev is not interested in reheating the genre. He takes Chabrol's blueprint — a wealthy man unravels upon discovering his wife's affair — and drapes it over the smoldering ruins of modern Russia, transforming a domestic thriller into a damning political fable.

The film opens in the early months of 2022. Gleb (Dmitriy Mazurov), a regional transport company executive, is summoned to the mayor's office alongside fellow business leaders. The directive is as blunt as it is bureaucratic: each of them must compile a list of workers to send to the front lines of Putin's war in Ukraine. The noose of the state tightens quietly, without drama—a chilling portrait of how ordinary men in positions of privilege become instruments of atrocity, not through passion or ideology, but through convenience and cowardice.

Gleb's solution is disturbingly practical. He hires fourteen new employees on permanent contracts—strangers with no personal loyalty, no history, and no emotional claim to his conscience— and adds their names to the list. The moral horror of Gleb's actions is presented without any emphasis. Zvyagintsev simply lets it breathe.

Into this already suffocating atmosphere comes the discovery that Gleb's wife, Galina (Iris Lebedeva), is having an affair. What follows is the film Chabrol made, reconstructed in Zvyagintsev's signature register: glacial, methodical, and shot through with a cold beauty that functions almost as accusation. Cinematographer Mikhail Krichman—Zvyagintsev's partner since The Return (2003)—delivers frames of autumnal severity that never let the eye rest easy. Every composition feels surveilled, as though the camera itself is complicit.

Mazurov is remarkable in the central role. He plays Gleb not as a monster but as something more troubling—a man entirely at home within systems of cruelty, who pivots from sending men to die to hunting his wife's lover with the same flat-eyed efficiency. Lebedeva, meanwhile, gives Galina a quiet, barely suppressed urgency, a woman whose affair reads less as betrayal than as escape velocity. The film is not sympathetic to either, but it is rigorous.

Minotaur works best when understood as what it is: a portrait of a class of men who have always known how to bury their crimes. The mythological title earns its weight—Gleb is not the Minotaur, but he feeds the labyrinth without question. This distinction serves as the film's subtle thesis.

At 140 minutes, the pacing is deliberate to the point of demanding patience. This is not a film that reaches for you. You must go to it. But those who do will find Zvyagintsev fully intact—still one of cinema's sharpest moral diagnosticians and still unflinching in his gaze at a nation that has, once again, chosen to look away.

Minotaur premiered in competition at the 79th Cannes Film Festival. MUBI will release the film later this year. The highly anticipated film went on to win the festival's prestigious Grand Prix (the runner-up prize to the Palme d'Or) as well as the Cannes Soundtrack Award for composers Evgueni and Sacha Galperine.