Russia, 2022. Amidst the comfortable trappings of affluence and domesticity, corporate executive Gleb (Dmitriy Mazurov) finds himself under siege on all fronts. At home, he is haunted by suspicions that his increasingly distant wife Galina (Iris Lebedeva) is unfaithful. At work, he contends with a demand from local authorities to draft a quota of employees for the war in Ukraine. Desperate to keep his hands clean, Gleb struggles to reassert control even as the collapse of his carefully ordered life seems fated to accelerate toward violence.
The Garden Cinema View:
Andrey Zvyagintsev returns with a typically slow burning descent into the darkness. Set during Moscow's mass mobilisation for its ongoing invasion of Ukraine, marital strife becomes inseparable from the repulsive political situation, and the corruption of the business classes. Minotaur cuts its audience adrift in a world with no moral compass making for a despairing viewing experience at times. The references to Greek mythology are opaque, although a ‘sacrifice’ of 14 workers to Putin’s war machine may indicate who, or what, the titular creature might be for Zvyagintsev.
However, this is a remake of Claude Chabrol's classic La Femme infidèle. Not only does Zvyagintsev broadly adhere to the narrative template of his predecessor, but there is dry vein of pitch-black humour which mixes Hitchcockian macabre with Russian fatalism. That being said Zvyagintsev has made a small, but crucial, alteration to Chabrol's original which makes complete sense within Minotaur's political context and adds a complex and mysterious emotional layer.
