The parting image in Andrey Zvyagintsev’s Loveless was a woman in a tracksuit with the word “RUSSIA” printed over it running on a treadmill—a pointed metaphor for a country on a road to nowhere. The film came out in 2017, sandwiched between the start of the war on Donbas and Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine; echoes of the atrocities survived in news bulletins that punctuated the story of a nuclear family slowly imploding after their only child went missing. People keep vanishing everywhere in Minotaur as well. It’s September 2022, and the lucky few who don’t get shipped to the frontlines are rushing to the nearest border to escape being drafted and begin afresh far from home. Nothing novel for Zvyagintsev: all his works see-saw between the micro and macro, domestic dramas and larger allegories of life under the metastatic cancer of the Putin regime. And his first feature co-written with Simon Lyashenko (as opposed to regular collaborator Oleg Negin) furthers those career-long fixations, though that morbid dance from small to bigger horrors has never felt quite as jarring.
Minotaur is a very loose adaptation of Claude Chabrol’s The Unfaithful Wife (1969), a “psycho-sexual study in murder,” the original English poster promised, wherein a husband discovers his wife’s infidelity and sets out to kill her lover. Fraught marriages are a cornerstone of Zvyagintsev’s corpus, and Gleb’s (Dmitriy Mazurov) rapport with Galina (Iris Lebedeva) is about as moribund as the relationships on which his predecessors pivoted. As with the strained couples from Loveless and Leviathan (2014), their only child, teenage Seryozha (Boris Kudrin), is very possibly the sole reason they’re still together. Equal parts affluent and miserable, they live in a massive waterfront villa whose floor-to-ceiling windows can hardly dispel the funereal darkness that festers inside it. Gleb is married to his work; Galina enjoys an affair with a 33-year-old photographer. But their long-defunct romance exists in the penumbra of a much greater tragedy.
The CEO of a prominent shipping company that’s among the city’s largest sources of income and employment—so cardinal he’s part of a tiny coterie of entrepreneurs with direct access to the mayor—Gleb is wrestling with a wave of resignations from staff fleeing Russia to avoid conscription. Putin’s “Special Military Operation” is in full swing, and with every town required to meet the government’s recruitment quotas, the businessman’s asked to do his bit and select fourteen employees to be sacrificed for Tsar and country. Zvyagintsev has changed co-scribe but not cinematographer, and in what’s arguably the film’s most chilling moment, Mikhail Krichman’s camera pans around a meeting room where the men Gleb has picked listen quietly to his instructions. They’ve been hired to drive new trucks. Or so he tells them; toward the end, Zvyagintsev returns to the lot as they sit with hundreds of other “volunteers” while an army spokesperson reminds them they’re all fighting “to remain human.”
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 (2025), 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.
But watching it makes for a lopsided experience. It’s hard to dispel the suspicion that Minotaur‘s background is ultimately more gripping than its fictional foreground. Notwithstanding the pivotal outburst of violence that upends the couple’s life—whose immediate aftermath Zvyagintsev stages as a wordless sequence perched between farce and horror—the marital drama, candied with rote altercations (“I don’t want to endure,” Galina snaps, “I want to live”) comes across as oddly mute. Part of that can be chalked up to the film’s locale. Zvyagintsev has long excelled at turning his settings into extensions of his characters’ psyches; watching Leviathan, in my book still his masterpiece, it’s not the marriage story that lingers but the way the director melded that to the vast seaside landscapes framing it, as spectrally empty as the folks who dwelled in them are psychologically broken.
Minotaur is an urban tale, and the indoor spaces Krichman singles out do not evoke the same metaphysical connection with their inhabitants. (They’re also, plainly stated, not as striking: the palette’s overemphasis on blues treads a fine line between the gloomy and monotonous.) And Zvyagintsev’s attempts to weave Gleb’s struggle into his country’s show an occasional heavy-handedness, as when a very suspenseful car ride is literally, all too emphatically interrupted by a train ferrying tanks to the battlefield.
Yet, in retrospect, there’s a kind of audacity to the film’s oscillating sprawl. Zvyagintsev is making space for a bourgeois love triangle against the backdrop of a war that’s blotted out everything else, and where domestic stories of such scale, in some fundamental sense, hardly matter. It is this cognitive dissonance that makes Minotaur such a fascinating oddity. In the end, what shocks here isn’t the state of denial that Gleb, Galina, and their moneyed friends have succumbed to—so immured in their enormous wealth and power they can laugh off words like “traitor” between hors d’oeuvres and dick jokes at upscale restaurants. It’s the fact that life, with its endless string of hopes and lies, traumas and reconciliations, still trudges on, even in the shadow of a catastrophe as asphyxiating as this.
Conversations about Zvyagintsev’s output tend to revolve around the same tired descriptors: his cinema is “bleak,” “cruel,” “heartless.” You could throw them all at Minotaur. But if his films feel so tragic, it is because they nonetheless understand that irreducibly human urge to keep on moving, even in the full knowledge that there’s no escape from the world’s horrors. The closing shot this time is a bird’s-eye view of clouds welcoming a plane as it begins its descent. Nine years since Loveless, Zvyagintsev’s characters are still running. They’ll never stop.
Minotaur premiered at the 2026 Cannes Film Festival and will be released by MUBI.