Andrey Zvyagintsev’s “Minotaur,” a domestic drama that gradually hardens into a grim, gripping thriller, is about a great many things. Its central narrative turns on a broken marriage, infidelity, and a sudden burst of violence, but that is only one piece of what the “Loveless” and “Leviathan” filmmaker is pursuing in his major new work.
Set in modern Russia, though shot in Latvia, the film examines the horrifying banality of political corruption, how even the most brutal wars can become background noise, and how systems of violence create new opportunities for exploitation. It is also about what happens when a society begins to accept immense cruelty as part of daily life. That Zvyagintsev does all this within the confines of a deceptively simple story about a family on the edge of collapse makes the film all the more effective.
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“Minotaur” is searingly political yet controlled and understated, maintaining a cold grip on its narrative as the world around it descends into chaos. Urgent and restrained, personal and political, it is one of the more pointed films about the present state of the world in recent memory. Though it could not be more different on a formal level, the recent film it most recalls is Jonathan Glazer’s “The Zone of Interest.” The scale of violence is not comparable, but “Minotaur” captures, with similar chilling force, how ordinary people can become not just complacent in the face of cruelty, but active collaborators in the violence of the state.
Based on Claude Chabrol’s 1969 French film “The Unfaithful Wife,” Zvyagintsev and co-writer Simon Liashenko bring the material into the present moment, amid Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, with no end in sight. In this landscape, Gleb Morozov (Dmitriy Mazurov), the CEO of a shipping company, is doing quite well for himself. Alongside his wife, Galina (Iris Lebedeva), and son, Seriosha (Boris Kudrin), he lives in a massive suburban home that, while much less architecturally conspicuous, has the same unsettling air as the house in “Parasite.” The place feels eerily quiet, in contrast to the war we know is unfolding beyond its walls.
Every scene is constructed with an eye for the sinister details of modern life during a period of spreading global conflict. An early moment in which Gleb tells an employee to stop watching war videos captures the cognitive dissonance that can metastasize into something politically poisonous. The film never lets us forget the shadow of the war hovering just outside the frame, even as men like Gleb do everything they can to ignore it. His response to the affair—attempting to minimize and contain it—is part of the same denial. It is a dangerous state of mind, and one that can only lead to more death when anyone threatens to puncture his delusions.
Zvyagintsev, who nearly died from complications of COVID, instills the film with a mournful gravity and quiet rage. One should be careful not to psychoanalyze a director through his work, but “Minotaur” feels like a film made by someone who has stared death in the face and knows what looks back. He understands the danger of pretending it is not there, and the film becomes an unnervingly precise expression of that knowledge. As “Minotaur” comes face-to-face with death, its tragic inevitability turns almost tragicomic when it becomes clear that no accountability is coming. By then, the characters have either bought into the delusion or chosen to perform belief in it, leaving behind an overwhelming sense of dread. But this is the truth Zvyagintsev arrives at: even when his characters look away, he never blinks. [A-]
