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Andrey Zvyagintsev<\/a> nearly died and then came back to life in 2021 amid COVID complications, but unlike another Cannes filmmaker<\/a> who resurrected from near-death only to make bad art, the Russian auteur\u2019s riveting comeback \u201cMinotaur<\/a>\u201d is not only a return to form \u2014 it\u2019s also exactly the kind of hopeless, coldly gazing, and politically indicting film<\/a> only the director of \u201cLeviathan\u201d and \u201cLoveless\u201d could ever make.<\/p>\n Based on Claude Chabrol\u2019s 1969 erotic thriller \u201cThe Unfaithful Wife,\u201d which itself inspired Adrian Lyne\u2019s deliciously lurid adaptation \u201cUnfaithful\u201d with Diane Lane in 2022, \u201cMinotaur\u201d 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\u2019ve seen this story before, and we know where it\u2019s going. But Zvyagintsev, with a camera as still and gimlet-eyed as the Sphinx except when it\u2019s 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\u2019ve 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.<\/p>\n Even without knowing the plot of Chabrol\u2019s or Lyne\u2019s film, you know everybody is doomed to their own resigned lot in life when you\u2019re in a Zvyagintsev picture, the same director who tore an already estranged couple apart with the disappearance of their son in \u201cLoveless,\u201d only for the boy never to be found because, well, that\u2019s life under Mother Russia. <\/p>\n But in the Russia of \u201cMinotaur,\u201d 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\u2019s daily horrors, in a modernist home made of glass, steel, fine wood, and concrete. It\u2019s autumn 2022, and Russia is mobilizing into Ukraine, with the town\u2019s mayor mandating that Gleb assemble a list of his employees to be drafted into service. Videos of bombings, meanwhile, are entering people\u2019s social media feeds.<\/p>\n Life at home for his wife Galina (Iris Lebedeva) is an empty chain of days; she\u2019s 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 \u201cMinotaur\u201d quite quickly reveals, she\u2019s 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\u2019s 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. <\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n It\u2019s no secret to the audience that Gleb, who has a history of infidelity and jealousy, is going to find out what she\u2019s up to, nor is it a shock how he reacts. It\u2019s 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. <\/p>\n But the thrill of \u201cMinotaur\u201d 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 \u2014 and with an unfliching camera that offers no reassurance \u2014 and you\u2019ll have some idea of just how bleak this unfeeling movie can get.<\/p>\n Mikhail Krichman, cinematographer on all Zvyagintsev\u2019s films, returns on \u201cMinotaur\u201d with a glacial, widescreen gaze that encourages the viewer to examine everything around them. There\u2019s a hypnotizing 360-shot that starts with Galina and Anton day-drinking and then getting into bed, with composers Evgueni and Sacha Galperine\u2019s worrying score pressing upon them, only to come back to the pair in an unchanged, postcoital position. But they can\u2019t stop what\u2019s coming to them, which is nothing good.<\/p>\n 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\u2019s house, only to later look at some serious hard evidence that could solve their wild goose case and instead think, eh, let\u2019s just go to lunch. Or this film\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n Zvyagintsev\u2019s latest film, like all of his others from the fraught father-son journey of \u201cThe Return\u201d to the slinking, snaky noir of \u201cElena,\u201d is devoid of easy resolution, least of all hope. It may feel too familiar to those who have followed this filmmaker\u2019s work closely, but \u201cMinotaur\u201d 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. <\/p>\n The actors are exquisite, transcending whatever allegorical mouthpieces you might read into them as, like when Lebedeva\u2019s 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\u2019s not cooking. Margherita pizza, margherita pizza. \u201cWhere is me?\u201d 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.<\/p>\n \u201cMinotaur\u201d isn\u2019t the best movie of Zvyagintsev\u2019s career, but the icily exacting power of his filmmaking is undeniable \u2014 and it sucks you in like a vortex. Rarely are you so glued to a tale you\u2019ve heard so many times before. Andrey Zvyagintsev<\/a>, welcome back. We missed, and we need you.<\/p>\n Grade: A-<\/p>\n \u201cMinotaur\u201d premiered at the 2026 Cannes<\/a> Film Festival. Mubi will release the film later this year.<\/p>\n Want to stay up to date on IndieWire\u2019s film\u00a0reviews<\/a>\u00a0and critical thoughts?\u00a0Subscribe here<\/a>\u00a0to our newsletter In Review by David Ehrlich, in which our Chief Film Critic and Head Reviews Editor rounds up the best new reviews and streaming picks along with some exclusive musings \u2014\u00a0all only available to subscribers.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Andrey Zvyagintsev nearly died and then came back to life in 2021 amid COVID complications, but unlike another…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":593049,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[27],"tags":[202894,160823,96,10923,2332,202895,2839,129,56,54,55],"class_list":["post-593048","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-movies","tag-andrey-zvyagintsev","tag-cannes","tag-entertainment","tag-festivals","tag-film","tag-minotaur","tag-movies","tag-reviews","tag-uk","tag-united-kingdom","tag-unitedkingdom"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/593048","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=593048"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/593048\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/593049"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=593048"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=593048"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=593048"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}![\"Tuner\"](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/05\/TUNER-TIFF-Still.jpg\")
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