Persuasively mapping Russian society’s moral malaise onto the many domestic deceptions of a marriage coming undone through ego and infidelity, this icily forbidding thriller by acclaimed director Andrey Zvyagintsev (The Return)—playing out on the precipice of Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine—exposes the privilege and cruelty of those powering Putin’s war machine. After corporate executive Gleb (Dmitriy Mazurov) learns his wife Galina (Iris Lebedeva) is having an affair, his carefully controlled life is plunged into chaos. Additionally pressured by the state to serve up employees for military conscription, Gleb takes an impulsive course of action in response to both crises, with devastating consequences for those in his inner circle.
Taken hostage by the clumsy, brute-force machinations of a toxic narcissist too powerful—and too shielded within the systems of violence he supports—to accept his deeper impotence, Galina realizes she is trapped in a loveless marriage, with few avenues for escape. All the subtleties and implications of Zvyagintsev’s typically restrained style feel unusually charged here with rage and despair; like the Chabrol film to which it is indebted, Minotaur—which won the Grand Prix at Cannes this year—is filled with eerie silences and with repressed emotions that, left unspoken, chill into morose complicity.
“Minotaur got under my skin because it never treats its political ideas and its human drama as two separate things,“ Edwin writes. “Gleb’s marriage is built around control, secrecy, resentment and emotional repression, while the system surrounding him operates through the same mechanisms on a much larger scale. He is a man accustomed to deciding what happens to other people, yet he is also trapped inside a political structure where decisions are being made for him. The more I watched, the more I felt like Andrey Zvyagintsev was showing me how a corrupt political system can seep into the most private parts of someone’s life, until there is almost no distinction between what is happening inside a home and what is happening outside of it.“ Adds Hannah: “It’s such a calculated, bleak film, and it’s very layered. I really enjoyed the way it places one family’s conflict against the backdrop of the war in Ukraine, the man of the house having an increasingly major role in each.“ IF