After a near-fatal battle with Long Covid that left him hospitalised and temporarily paralysed, Andrey Zvyagintsev returns to Cannes with Minotaur, a bleak comedy that yokes marital betrayal to his favourite topic: the moral collapse of post-communist Russia.
Loosely reworking Claude Chabrol’s La Femme Infidèle, the film follows Gleb, a wealthy transport-company boss living in a bleak provincial town during the early months of the Russian invasion of Ukraine. His unhappy wife, Galina, is having an affair; meanwhile, local officials demand that businessmen provide employees for military conscription, in effect deciding which men may be sacrificed to the war.
Gleb’s response is chillingly pragmatic. Rather than lose existing workers, he recruits new truck drivers under false promises, knowing they will be drafted almost immediately. At the same time he begins to suspect Galina’s infidelity, pushing the film towards murder, cover-up and a spiralling moral vacuum.
Dmitriy Mazurov and Iris Lebedeva are both superb, playing characters hollowed out by cynicism, privilege and despair. Zvyagintsev’s icy visual control remains formidable. There is unmistakable fury about the conflict, but the political allegory can feel overextended, straining to connect every domestic cruelty to the state itself. Look here, there’s yet another wounded combat veteran; look there, there’s a street mural of General Zhukov.
READ MORE
Minotaur works best as gallows humour: a chronicle of a selfish, privileged class trapped in systems they helped create, trying to bury bodies while pretending nothing has happened.
