Now living in exile, Russian filmmaker Andrey Zvyagintsev has been creating impeccable, trenchant allegories about the moral and political condition of his home country throughout the 21st century, and his latest is one of his most riveting and razor-sharp. Set in 2022 Russia, MINOTAUR centers on middle-aged businessman Gleb (Dmitry Mazurov), a transport company CEO who lives an ultra-comfortable domestic life with his wife Galina (Iris Lebedeva) and teenage son in a sleek modernist home in a private wooded area. As the film begins, he is tasked by the town’s powerful mayor with drafting a quota of his employees to send to the newly ongoing war in Ukraine; at the same time, he begins to suspect that Galina is having an affair, which leads him to take drastic action. With the finesse of his stated inspiration Claude Chabrol, Zvyagintsev has constructed a tale of corruption — personal, patriarchal, and governmental — that slow-burns with rage and fearless dark humor. Winner of the Grand Prix at this year’s Cannes Film Festival.
“Teeming with rage, despair, elastic metaphor and darkest gallows humor…. The film functions as both a classical, supremely well-made domestic thriller, and as a bristling state-of-the-nation takedown…. MINOTAUR is bound up in the love-hate quandary that so often defines the people and places we’re closest to: Though it finds its maker working entirely outside Russia, that distance is scarcely detectable in its stunning, seething portraiture.” —Guy Lodge, Variety “The thrill of “Minotaur”MINOTAUR 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.” —Ryan Lattanzio, IndieWire “Andrey Zvyagintsev’s astonishing new film, MINOTAUR, uses the cyclical, endless violence found within the myth and transposes it onto modern-day Russia. It’s an ancient tale told within a chilling, new context that poses an inevitable question. What kind of man is able to make it out of the minotaur’s elaborate maze alive? In the legend, that was impossible, but in a modern context, the answer is even more disturbing.” —Sophia Ciminello, Awards Watch
