4 min readCannesMay 20, 2026 01:51 PM IST
Minotaur movie review: There are only a handful of filmmakers who consistently hit their mark when they intertwine broad-scale events with intimacy. One of them is Andrei Zvyaguintsev, who has been living in Paris after a near-death experience with Covid, and who is back in Cannes competition with yet another terrific film.
You may call it an exile. The Russian filmmaker himself has gone on record about not being able to live, in all conscience, in his own country after the invasion of Ukraine. Minotaur, shot in Latvia (not Russia where all his earlier films have been shot), is a double-barrelled portrait, of a marriage and a country, on the brink.
It is 2022. The war in Ukraine has already stretched for six months, and the Russian authorities are busy drafting citizens to volunteer for service at the border. The air is full of uncertainty; the only thing that’s certain is that big business and fat-cat oligarchs will have to make significant sacrifices, both in terms of money and manpower.
Prosperous business owner Galeb (Dmitriy Mazurov) who lives with his wife Galina (Iris Lebideva) in a stunning country villa, all glass and tasteful wood, finds himself cornered from all ends. He doesn’t want to betray his workers, but at the same time he can’t go against official diktat: he wants to keep his wife happy, but like many marriages, the two don’t quite fit with each other the way they used to.
Galeb’s discovery of Galina’s two-timing — she’s having an affair with a photographer — catapults the former into a place of no return. That the smooth Galeb has a rough side to him, is revealed early on when he gives his young son tips on how to deal with bullies — take the bull by the horns, so to speak. That Galeb is quite the bull himself, in a clear nod to the title, is foreshadowed in that little exchange, and from then on, we wait, on edge, for him to unleash the beast within.
The film may be based on Claude Chabrol’s 1969 ‘The Unfaithful Wife’ but it gets its contemporary edge with the inclusion of references to the unrest on the borders, and everyone, especially those who have to obey orders, is clueless about what happens next.
One of the most affecting parts of the film has nothing to do with the tawdry affair and its even tawdrier outcome. It is when the new recruits are being packed off in buses, not knowing when they will be back again, with their stricken families standing by helplessly, that you feel the weight of a war that is, as always, declared by the powerful and fought by the powerless.
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A chunk of time is spent in establishing the rage of the cuckold — it isn’t as if he has any clarity of what he will do when he confronts the lover, who brings the wife alive in a way that the husband has forgotten — and by the time he realises what he’s done, it’s done. What’s striking is the way– no panic, no wringing hands — he gets down to business, and he goes at it in a systematic, cold-blooded manner that tells you exactly what kind of man he is. Or perhaps a psychopath hiding in plain sight.
It is brilliantly acted, with the director’s trademark scalpel carving cleanly out what we wants to show us, nothing overt, but nothing hidden either: a portrait of Putin hanging in the mayor’s office, a poster saying Stop This, an unhappy woman not being gaslit until she is.
Minotaur lacerates, but gently and persuasively, and is easily one of the best of the Cannes competition films this year.
Minotaur movie cast: Dmitriy Mazurov, Iris Lebideva
Minotaur movie director: Andrei Zvyaguintsev
Minotaur movie rating: 4 stars
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