‘Minotaur’ Review: Andrey Zvyagintsev Returns in Impeccable Form With a Despairing, Darkly Funny Reflection on Corruption and Betrayal in Putin’s Russia

One of the first things you notice about “Minotaur” is how much space there is in it. Uncrammed domestic interiors give the camera enough room to scrutinize details in stalking, unimpeded pans; modern gray office suites appear half-furnished and half-empty, as if the company is either moving in or dying out; public streets and housing estates are so uncrowded, it feels you could practically commit a murder in broad daylight; in a family man’s tank-like Volvo, the back seats fold down to create enough cargo space for a bicycle, or a body. Exiled Russian director Andrey Zvyagintsev‘s majestic new film may be shot by necessity in Latvia, but that country fills in most persuasively for his homeland, conveying both its aggressive vastness in the midst of a war that seeks only to further expand its borders, and its eerie depopulation, by people either fleeing or being called to battle.

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Returning Zvyagintsev to the Cannes competition, where “The Banishment” (2007), “Leviathan” (2014) and “Loveless” (2017) were all awarded, the director’s sixth feature is his first since the latter title — ending a nine-year gap that spans, among other things, a certain global pandemic that nearly took Zvyagintsev’s life in 2021, leaving him paralyzed in hospital for months, and Russia’s invasion of Ukraine the next year. The world is quite a different place, in other words, from when this most politically and historically conscious of filmmakers, now based in France, last stepped behind the camera; there is some catching up to do. Teeming with rage, despair, elastic metaphor and darkest gallows humor, “Minotaur” is very much up to the task.

At first glance, an adaptation of Claude Chabrol’s 1969 melodrama “La femme infidèle” seems an odd choice of vehicle for the occasion: Already remade once by Adrian Lyne as the glossy erotic drama “Unfaithful” in 2002, Chabrol’s witty, rueful crime-of-passion tale is a small, contained affair that exists largely untethered to time and place. That makes it inherently reworkable — certainly, not many films have inspired two remakes as aesthetically and textually disparate as “Unfaithful” and “Minotaur” — but what does this story of adultery and its worst-case-scenario consequences have to say to a world on fire?

Quite a lot, in fact. Showing surprising fidelity to the bones of Chabrol’s story, while completely reimagining their social and systemic meaning in an especially corrupt 21st-century patriarchy, the film functions as both a classical, supremely well-made domestic thriller, and as a bristling state-of-the-nation takedown, identifying Putin’s principles of entitlement, intimidation and denial in places both obvious — a mayoral office, a military draft center — and more quietly coded. Unaccountable despotism, it turns out, begins at home.

Not that Gleb (Dmitriy Mazurov) appears especially monstrous when we first encounter him in the sprawling modernist house he shares with his wife Galina (Iris Lebedeva) and their teenage son Seryozha (Boris Kudrin), on the wooded outskirts of an unidentified Russian town some distance from Moscow. A successful CEO of a transport company, he provides generously for his family, though his emotional support is on the rougher side: His advice to his son for dealing with a school bully is to shake the other kid before threatening to bash his face in. (Only threaten, mind you: “Whoever starts a fight loses for being stupid,” he advises. Those words may come back to haunt him.)

The marital bed, meanwhile, has apparently been cold for some time, as an early, telling shot shows Galina wordlessly turning out the light and hitting the hay while Gleb continues scrolling on his phone beside her. It’s clear from the outset that Galina is having an affair of some description, her otherwise drawn, unhappy-looking face lighting up only when when she receives a text from an unidentified party who turns out to be handsome younger photographer Anton (Yuriy Zavalnyouk).

Gleb, too, can read the signs, but tends to let the matter lie. It’s hinted that he has his own history of side pieces, and besides, the year is 2022: There are bigger things to worry about, with the country newly at war, and Gleb, along with a number of other business leaders in his community, called upon by the town mayor (Vladimir Friedman) to give up a sizable quota of his male employees to the draft, with or without their consent.

Though he’s directly glimpsed only in an undersized portrait hung too high above the mayor’s desk, Putin looms large on proceedings, not just via the glum war effort that has the whole community on edge — the threat of the draft striking fear into the hearts of men and their families, and cuing Gleb’s most cold-blooded betrayal — but in a nonchalant culture of violence that has seeped into the roots of this society.

It’s here that the contemporary concerns of Zvyagintsev and co-writer Simon Lyashenko’s lean but luxuriantly patient adaptation dovetail fascinatingly with the narrative mechanics of Chabrol’s original film, as Gleb, in the first of several out-of-character impulses, is moved to meet with Anton, and the situation escalates from there, in tense, exacting, sometimes hilariously mundane detail. And if the ensuing fallout is where “Minotaur” diverges most drastically from Chabrol’s template, it also does so in ways that scathingly meet the moment in Russia right now, at both a spiritual and institutional level.

Blessed with a face perfect for the kind of elite Russian everyman that so interests Zvyagintsev — rugged but a little soft, handsome but a little not — Mazurov makes for a superb antihero, keeping Gleb’s thoughts and feelings legible if only variably sympathetic, and lending the film a note of dry, mordant physical comedy at his most aggravated moments of crisis. Though she guides less of the film’s perspective than in previous versions of this story, Lebedeva is its most electric, volatile presence, changing the tempo and temperature of scenes — in particular, one late-film instance of intimate bedroom reconciliation — with a short, tart glare or gesture, as Galina rails against a system that only identifies her relative to other men, as a wife, a mother or a faithless lover. “Where’s me?” she asks Gleb, expecting no answer, and getting none.

Mikhail Krichman, Zvyagintsev’s regular DP, shoots “Minotaur” with the same deliberate, meticulous command of the widescreen frame that he’s brought to the director’s previous films — though there’s less overt beauty to be found here. The lighting of interiors is often harder and harsher than usual, and any ravishing landscapes are largely supplanted by desolate street shots of a depleted town, concrete-heavy and otherwise graying, unsmilingly watched over by the giant, generic faces of soldiers on military recruitment billboards. “Minotaur” is bound up in the love-hate quandary that so often defines the people and places we’re closest to: Though it finds its maker working entirely outside Russia, that distance is scarcely detectable in its stunning, seething portraiture.