Minotaur Review: Russia Caught In A Labyrinth

Writer-director Andrey Zvyagintsev returns angrier than ever with Minotaur, his latest excoriation of the authoritarian Russian state.

Scorsese doesn’t always make mobster pictures, and Spielberg isn’t always pining over absent fathers. Andrey Zvyagintsev, on the other hand, can be reliably depended upon to skewer the contemporary Russian political firmament with righteous anger. Minotaur, Zvyagintsev’s first feature since 2017’s Loveless, delivers almost exactly what you’d expect from the exiled filmmaker, but reliability doesn’t mean predictability. His latest is a sharp rebuff of Vladimir Putin’s warmongering, told without compunction or fear.

For all his anger, Zvyagintsev wields his camera like a scientist uses a microscope, straining at modern Russia to see what makes it tick. Gleb (Dmitriy Mazurov) is an ideal subject for examination, living in a well-appointed lakehouse with large windows that frame him and his well-to-do family in their luxury and deceptions. On the surface, they’re picture-perfect; Gleb is the CEO of a successful haulage company in an unidentified Russian city, married to the beautiful Galina (Iris Lebedeva), and raising their teenage son Seryozha (Boris Kudrin).

All looks rosy at the dinner table, they appear happy, but truths emerge whenever one variable is removed from the frame. Once alone, Galina is bathed in the glow of her phone, talking to someone beyond the happy life within those window frames. The resulting tension comes not from wondering to whom Galina is talking, but just the knowledge that she will be found out, and it can’t possibly end well. 

The economy of Zvyagintsev’s filmmaking in these scenes belies his anger, born of deep trauma he has endured since making Loveless. In 2021, Covid-19 almost killed the now 62-year-old and left him hospitalized for months. It was in the middle of his almost year-long recuperation that Russia began its invasion of Ukraine. Minotaur has morphed Zvyagintsev’s pain into a laser-focused blast of fire at Putin’s monstrous ego. The Kremlin thrives on secrecy, but the characters in Minotaur operate in a world of windows, unable to hide their secrets.

Mikhail Krichman’s cinematography is muted but polished; every window is clean and unrestricted, allowing us and the people in charge complete access. The glass walls of Gleb’s offices let him see when his employees are watching war footage online. It’s also through these walls that Gleb determines who he needs to lay off, and who he might nominate to send to the front lines in Ukraine, as per the orders of the local mayor (Vladimir Friedman). Meetings with the mayor take place under the glare of Putin’s portrait. It’s only visible in the background, but we know who pulls the strings, even at this provincial level.

Minotaur’s intrigues go a long way to counteracting the bitter pill of having to spend time with Gelb, who is at once a Putin stooge in his subservience to government for profit, and a stand-in for Putin’s increasing encroachment on the privacy and freedom of his people. Putin’s social contract with his people has allowed his security and defence machinery to operate unimpeded as long as personal freedoms aren’t impacted. That line has already been crossed, and Gelb follows suit. He has Galina’s phone surveilled, revealing her paramour to be Anton (Yuriy Zavalnyouk).

This other man is everything Gelb isn’t; dashingly handsome, artistic (He’s a photographer) and lacking any discernible insecurity. Zvyagintsev shows all this in a memorable sequence. As Galina and Anton canoodle in bed, the camera slows pans away from their toned bodies to show off the rest of Anton’s humble but lived-in apartment, a cosy contrast to Galina and Gelb’s cathedralesque modern mansion. Expressions of interest in anything beyond the status quo have to be illicit.

Gelb finding out about Anton, and the resulting violent consequences, already provides compelling dramatic powderkeg, ripe with the satirical bite Zvyagintsev needs. However, this is not a new story. The real genius of Minotaur lies in how the writer-director tailors an existing tale of sexual mendacity to his own needs. The story is an adaptation of Chabrol’s 1969 film The Unfaithful Wife, which still pulses with the fragility of a professional man being usurped in his wife’s desires by a more sensitive man. The leads of both Zvyagintsev and Chabrol’s texts seek to police their wives’ sexual desires by any means necessary, when their actions do not conform to their playbook.

Mazurov cloaks Gelb’s menace behind his soft-yet-angular looks, and bears a passing resemblance to the current Russian president. The Putin regime is forever locked in Zvyagintsev’s aim. The second half of Minotaur sees a police state maneuvering to cover its own hide when its own actions come with foreseeable consequences, like a small-scale recreation of stories coming out of Russia in increasing volume. Like Leviathan and Loveless, it remains to be seen if the satirical jabs here will remain relevant in years and viewings to come. That will be for history to decide, but as a portrait of this moment, Minotaur is merciless.

Minotaur has the air of a work from a man with nothing to lose. The title refers to the bullheaded creature from ancient Greek mythology. Even if Theseus/Zvyagintsev manages to slay the beast, they still have to navigate their way out of the labyrinth afterwards. Minotaur is not naïve; it knows that Russia cannot be changed overnight. When a police officer investigating a murder sees the investigation has been dropped, he asks, “Why do we bother?” The exiled Zvyagintsev bothers because no-one else can, and no-one else could have made Minotaur roar like this.

Minotaur premiered in competition at the Cannes Film Festival on May 19, 2026.