Minotaur
The winner of this year’s Grand Prix at Cannes, Andrey Zvyagintsev’s first film in almost a decade is an immaculate, sometimes darkly funny howl of rage at the corruption and moral entropy of Vladimir Putin’s war-enmeshed Russia.
In the immediate wake of his nation’s invasion of Ukraine, wealthy company CEO Gleb is directed to provide cannon fodder for Russia’s war machine. As he is ‘volunteering’ men to be drafted from within his employee pool, he learns that his wife Galina is having an affair with a handsome young artist. This intersection of Gleb’s professional and private crises becomes a trigger point for a shocking showdown.
After recovering from a near-fatal coma in 2021, dissident Russian director Andrey Zvyagintsev (Loveless, MIFF 2017) has returned to reinterpret Claude Chabrol’s 1969 classic The Unfaithful Wife as a staunchly contemporary study of masculinity, both personal and political. His life in exile in France has only sharpened his fury at the current state of his fatherland, which is directed with exquisite precision not just at Putin and his cronies but also at the everyday collaborators, deliberate or accidental, who proliferate in the shadow of war. Shot in Latvia, Minotaur is a merciless thriller for our present times, with a crisp and cunning eye for detail and a savage streak of wry humour – a pièce de résistance in more ways than one.
“Minotaur seems destined for masterpiece status … 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.” – Time Out
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