Minotaur

History shows than invasions invariably lead to massive population flights – though it’s not usually the invading country’s population doing the fleeing. In 2022, Putin’s assault on Ukraine led to an exodus of conscription-age Russians, heading overseas to avoid dying in the Donbas, and exposing the kind of social fault line that dissident director Andrey Zvyagintsev loves to chip away at with his austere cross-examinations of modern Russia.

This existential moment is more of a business quandary for the man at the heart of Minotaur, a marital drama that evolves into a metronomic and mesmerising thriller that flickers with moments of mordant satire (there are laughs, honestly).

Logistics CEO Gleb (Dmitriy Mazurov), suddenly left with several roles to fill, is summoned to a meeting with the mayor where he discover that he and his fellow business leaders also have to offer some of their employees up for military service in Ukraine. It’s a Dostoyevskian predicament that Gleb deals with like the capitalist he is: he fabricates a clutch of new roles at the company and promptly puts the entire intake on the conscription list. The only employee he wants to save from military service is his head of security, who has been spying on his unfaithful wife Galina (Iris Lebedeva) for him – and he’s not in much of a hurry to do even that.

It’s at this point, with the introduction of Galina’s lover, a handsome photographer closer to her age, that the film spirals off in a dark new direction.

Zvyagintsev, who lives in France and filmed this in Latvia, reserves a special place in hell for his weak, complacent protagonist. The filmmaker’s last two films – Leviathan and Loveless – charted the political corruption of Putin’s Russia and the implosion of a marriage respectively, and Minotaur draws those two threads neatly together. He cleverly transplants elements of Claude Chabrol’s thriller The Unfaithful Wife from ’60s Paris to this unnamed provincial city where money talks and the workers end up in the Donbas meat grinder.

Zvyagintsev may be the greatest Russian filmmaker since Tarkovsky

Gleb and Galina’s modernist dacha and their bourgeois world of bitchy friends eating at expensive restaurants is pure odium to Zvyagintsev. He moves the camera only when he has something to say, as with 360-degree pan around a dozen or so expectant faces listening to Gleb bullshit them about their fake jobs. 

For long stretches, Minotaur (does the mythological allusion refer to the maze or the monster?) seems destined for masterpiece status. But both the central characters and their marriage end up a little under-drawn, with Galina expressing her disillusionment in wishy-washy terms and Gleb’s interactions with their tweenage son inconsequential to the wider drama. Galina is also short-changed by an ending that uses her as additional ballast for the film’s fierce critique.

All the same, Zvyagintsev has made another remarkable film full of moral clarity that will get up the nose of all the right people. He may just be the greatest Russian filmmaker since Tarkovsky, and he’s definitely the ballsiest. 

Minotaur premiered at the Cannes Film Festival.