Andrey Zvyagintsev’s subdued and sinister thriller reaches into the depths of Russian corruption through the tumultuous relationship between a neglectful businessman and his adulterous wife.
“What do you want to endure?” is a throwaway question in Andrey Zvyagintsev’s Minotaur, a pithy insult in a major argument between a rich Russian husband and wife. Galina (Iris Lebedeva) is drunk and upset about the uselessness of being the neglected wife of a wealthy CEO, Gleb (Dmitriy Mazurov)—she wants to live, to endure, but her clumsy cries for a richer, grander experience fail to convince. Neither of them mention the elephant in the room—Galina’s young, hot lover Anton (Yuriy Zavalnyouk), the discovery of whom propelled Gleb to a drastic, impulsive act.
Fans of Claude Chabrol’s The Unfaithful Wife or Adrian Lyne’s American remake Unfaithful will have some sense of how Gleb reacts to his marital betrayal. Zvyagintsev makes the erotic thriller narrative his own by setting the film in early 2022, with Russia’s invasion of Ukraine newly underway, many military-age citizens are fleeing for neighbouring borders, and the military commissariat is demanding conscripts from municipalities and major employers. Gleb must think of a creative way to send 14 of his employees to the front lines without hurting his business; Minotaur builds a bleak, overwhelming power by paralleling the revenge of a wealthy cuckold with glimpses of a nation mobilising while protecting its established oligarchal class.
Minotaur is Zvyagintsev’s first film since 2017’s Loveless—and also since his near-death battle with Covid and lung damage over the pandemic. Like Loveless, Minotaur is pessimistic about love in a neglectful, corrupt world; an extended dinner where the characters gossip about their divorced friend’s young girlfriend—a familiar sight in “marriage in crisis” dramas—gives the early section of Minotaur a boost of scathing, ironic humour that collapses into paranoid dread by the midpoint, confirmed by an extended post-crime clean-up filled with imperfections that would have delighted Hitchcock. Unlike Hitchcock’s leering, suspense-boosting camerawork, Zvyagintsev’s shots are cold, patient, evoking unease or apathy with a surgical precision; the steel and stone of Gleb’s world contributing to the mix of blue and grey hues that defines the film’s visual palette.
“Mazurov and Lebedeva are incredibly convincing as a couple afflicted with ordinary dissatisfaction and resentment, who also contend with their own private nightmares. We never see Galina and Gleb more shaken than when, after the Anton affair explodes in both of their faces, they each return in secret to the stifling normalcy of their luxury family life – Lebedeva especially communicates the utter loneliness and whiplash of returning to a world you know is safe, but also barren.”
Rory Doherty
Mazurov and Lebedeva are incredibly convincing as a couple afflicted with ordinary dissatisfaction and resentment, who also contend with their own private nightmares. We never see Galina and Gleb more shaken than when, after the Anton affair explodes in both of their faces, they each return in secret to the stifling normalcy of their luxury family life – Lebedeva especially communicates the utter loneliness and whiplash of returning to a world you know is safe, but also barren. Mazurov ably handles the layered contradictions of his character – the problem that Gleb ever registers on a moral level is, of course, the one that humiliates him personally, and seeing himself as blameless, he’s entitled to regain his virile patriarchal authority however he wants. We see him patiently coaching his teenage son on how to physically intimidate a school bully into leaving him alone, but when he confronts his own “pretty boy” rival, he disastrously fails to keep any cool.
In Zvyagintsev’s impressively austere laceration of Russian corruption, one thing often looks like another thing. The film opens with Gleb stepping outside to take a call out of his wife’s earshot; an urgent work crisis could also be a report from a private detective. In Gleb’s modern but dingy office, he barks at subordinates and talks tactics with HR like a general on the front line. Gleb’s confrontation with Anton and subsequent, thorough mission to remove evidence they ever met lingers in our mind when we watch a battalion of new troops lectured about the ideological necessity of their cause – to preserve traditional values, to keep the family intact. In reality, both private and militaristic acts of aggression express the same corrupt message: “This is to remind you I’m in charge.” Minotaur feels like a window into the private, ugly tensions that facilitate Russian power doing exactly what it wants, a subdued and sinister thriller about closing ranks with instinctive ease, at the cost of an easily discarded soul.
