Minotaur: Andrey Zvyagintsev’s beautifully sinister Chabrol adaptation dissects Russian authoritarianism

• Reviewed from the 2026 Cannes Film Festival 

Let’s start with that ending, a gorgeously sinister parting shot that gives away nothing but tells you everything about Andrey Zvyagintsev’s brilliant, blackhearted Minotaur. Someone looks out of an airplane window, and then we are outside and the image is monochrome, clouds as far as you can see, pretty and bulbous and white. But the shot goes on, and now there are moments when the clouds look less like clouds than like plumes of smoke rising from a thousand exploding bombs. And still the shot lingers, until soon you cannot see anything but bombs.

As much as any movie from the Russian master (now an exile in France after his long recovery from near-fatal Covid), Minotaur is a coldly crystalline game of composition and duration, of cinematic space and time. Cinematographer Mikhail Krichman’s impeccable frames are often elegantly half-empty, while Zvyagintsev’s editing indulges his trademark tic of hanging onto the end of a shot after the action is done, for a beat or seven longer than necessary or comfortable. Somehow, given all this room, a simple domestic drama — actually Zvyagintsev and co-writer Simon Lyashenko’s adaptation of Claude Chabrol’s The Unfaithful Wife — expands into a potent and perfectly mapped allegory for the mechanisms of Russian authoritarianism which, once it’s seen, cannot be unseen.

The central couple – who you’d think would stagger under the weight of all they symbolise, yet who move through this cruel world of theirs with oblivious self-assurance – are Gleb and Galina (Dmitriy Mazurov and Iris Lebedeva, both outstanding). Attractive and wealthy, with a standard-issue sullen teenage son, they live in a glassed-in, angular, difficult-to-heat house: a movie byword for soulless entitlement. Gleb, as the CEO of a logistics company, is an important man in this small Russian city. But his firm is haemorrhaging staff even before he is ordered to draw up a list of 14 more employees to be forcibly drafted and sent to fight, perhaps to die, in Ukraine. The Minotaur of ancient myth required the periodic sacrifice of 14 innocents.

Preoccupied by these troubles, Gleb is also suspicious of Galina’s mysterious phone calls and the way her face lights up at random text messages. She is indeed having an affair (the marriage’s prior infidelities have usually been Gleb’s), with a photographer named Anton (Yuriy Zavalnyouk), who lives in a cluttered apartment in a Soviet-era tower block. His lifestyle looks bohemian but really is just far less wealthy, as underlined when, while the pair make love on tousled bedsheets, the camera does a tight 360 of the flat. In sardonic counterpoint to all the luxuriant unused space in Gleb and Galina’s home, here’s an untidy living room and a kitchen scattered with coffee cups. And here too is a little balcony, off which later, a nearly-dead body will be tossed in broad daylight, in plain view of hundreds of windows, cuing a wordless 20-minute corpse-disposal sequence that is straight-up comedic in its clumsiness.

Gleb’s reactions to his marital and professional woes appear motivated less by love for his wife or concern for his employees, than by fear of losing face and ceding territory. And so it could be that Galina, as much as those doomed staffers, is to be pitied. But everything about Galina refutes victimhood. During a confrontation in their bedroom, Gleb strides about fully clothed while Galina sits at her vanity in revealing nightwear – normally the subservient position. But the blocking inverts the power dynamic with Gleb belittled while Galina effortlessly dominates, her long legs splayed in a pose that is almost lewd, almost masculine in its casual assumption that the space is hers to occupy.

It’s not that our sympathies seesaw between Gleb and Galina – no one is sympathetic in Zvyagintsev’s Russia. Instead the currents of culpability flow back and forth. Who is worse, after all, the man who acquires a trophy wife, or the wife who grooms herself to be thus acquired? Which is worse, a paranoid state that can only prove its “strongman” credentials to its people through violence? Or a fickle people who may dabble in rebellion but who will fall into complicit lockstep with the most indefensible crimes the second their self-interest is jeopardised?

By the end of Minotaur, it seems like the various human sacrifices have, at least for a time, sated the beast. But all the wrong people are safe, all the wrong values have been upheld and it’s been shown that nothing – not infidelity, not murder, not war – can even mildly dent the complacency of privilege. It doesn’t really matter if they’re clouds or bombs when you’re this far away from them, insulated from the consequences of your actions by miles and miles of empty sky.