Minotaur Trailer: Andrey Zvyagintsev’s Cannes Winner Opens This November

Nearly a decade after his last feature Loveless, and a great amount of personal and political strife in between as he dealt with severe COVID and living in exile, Andrey Zvyagintsev returned to Cannes with his latest drama. The Claude Chabrol-inspired Minotaur, which picked up the Grand Prix, will now get a theatrical release on November 20 and MUBI has released the new trailer.

Here’s the New York Film Festival synopsis: “Now living in exile, Russian filmmaker Andrey Zvyagintsev has been creating impeccable, trenchant allegories about the moral and political condition of his home country throughout the 21st century, and his latest is one of his most riveting and razor-sharp. Set in 2022 Russia, Minotaur centers on middle-aged businessman Gleb (Dmitry Mazurov), a transport company CEO who lives an ultra-comfortable domestic life with his wife Galina (Iris Lebedeva) and teenage son in a sleek modernist home in a private wooded area. As the film begins, he is tasked by the town’s powerful mayor with drafting a quota of his employees to send to the newly ongoing war in Ukraine; at the same time, he begins to suspect that Galina is having an affair, which leads him to take drastic action. With the finesse of his stated inspiration Claude Chabrol, Zvyagintsev has constructed a tale of corruption—personal, patriarchal, and governmental—that slow-burns with rage and fearless dark humor. Winner of the Grand Prix at this year’s Cannes Film Festival. A MUBI release.”

Leonardo Goi said in his review, “Minotaur is never so shattering as when it widens scope, sidelining the couple to embrace the have-nots around them, which is to say the throngs of civilians roped into a war none of them ever asked for. Where works like Loveless and Leviathan often relied on proxies to mount their critiques of the Putin regime—corrupt politicians or perfidious clerics—scenes like these combine to make Minotaur Zvyagintsev’s most searing indictment yet. The director decamped to Paris in the summer of 2022; like Sergei Loznitsa’s Two Prosecutors, his latest was shot entirely in Latvia, and often reads as an exiled son’s coruscating j’accuse to a motherland that’s drifting farther away from him each day.”

See the preview and poster below: