At its core, “Minotaur” tells a familiar story. Above all, Claude Chabrol comes to mind, one of the heroes of the Nouvelle Vague: his murderous plays, which are set in the upper classes, are rarely about finding the perpetrators, but rather about the (self-)decomposition of the bourgeoisie. The best-known example is “The Unfaithful Wife” from 1969 (remade in the USA as “Unfaithful” in 2002), in which a wealthy man hires a detective to identify his wife’s lover – and then kills him in a fit. In “Minotaur” this rich man is the local Russian oligarch Gleb (Dmitriy Mazurov), who suspects his distant wife Galina (Iris Lebedeva) of cheating on him – and the rest of the plot follows the model more or less exactly. But “Minotaur” still doesn’t seem like a mere imitation that could score points solely with its magnificent, high-gloss Cinemascope images and its tight production of suspense.
Because sometimes the same story suddenly has a completely new effect in a different place. The Cannes regular Andrey Zvyagintsev (2015 Oscar nominee for best foreign language film: “Leviathan”) has always been a proven critic of the institutions of his home country – and after he was in a coma in a German hospital for several months in 2021 due to a serious Covid illness and the attack on Ukraine took place during his rehab stay, he never returned to Russia at all. “Minotaur” is now set during the war in 2022 in a deliberately undefined Russian provincial town (it was shot in Riga, Latvia) – and this modified context of the mysterious noir story actually changes almost everything!
Gleb (Dmitriy Mazurov) is almost certain that his wife Galina (Iris Lebedeva) is cheating on him.
Because before Gleb can take on his attractive wife’s young lover, he first has to take care of another problem. The mayor has just told the city’s business bosses that the recruiting authority expects him to provide a list of 150 names of men for military service within a week. Gleb’s freight forwarding company is supposed to contribute 14 people – and there are already enough setbacks in trying to keep the company running:
Every morning the head of the HR department has a list of employees who have crossed the border into Georgia and are therefore only available remotely. But Gleb has a plan: If he doesn’t want to sacrifice any of his current employees for Putin’s war, then he’ll have to quickly find 14 new people to put on the list instead…
Luxury dies last
“Minotaur” begins with everyday family life: a visit from the mother-in-law, a brief argument while loading the dishwasher. As long as nothing important happens, you have enough time to admire Gleb and his family’s house – absolute madness! The office is also very chic and tasteful, airy and with lots of glass. The film remains exclusively in the executive suites, where HR and IT are located. Gleb makes his fortune from trucks, but we barely see one throughout the film. The same applies to the drivers, between whom he would actually have to choose who to put on the army’s list. The impacts are getting closer, the personnel shortage can actually no longer be hidden – but appearances still hold! Luxury also continues to dominate when dining with other local business leaders.
Everyone knows that a place on the list for men is probably a death sentence. The church and the state sing in unison the song of willingness to sacrifice for the motherland. But if Gleb has to lead 14 people to the scaffold as required by the state, what does one more or less count? “Minotaur” shows in great detail how Gleb tries harder than ever to remove his traces after the spontaneous act. Just wiping away the pool of blood takes minutes. Something so amateurish isn’t really the stuff of a thriller – even students at the police academy in their first semester would probably have solved the case in five minutes.
But the way in which “Minotaur” once again makes it very clear where we are not only produces one of the best shots of the cinema year – at least at the world premiere in Cannes there was also a very deserved spontaneous applause!
Conclusion: A noir drama captured in magnificent Cinemascope images, which at its core tells a well-known story about a husband who murders out of jealousy, but still packs a completely different, quite violent punch thanks to the new context. Bitterly evil and brilliantly staged!
We saw “Minotaur” at the 2026 Cannes Film Festival, where the film had its world premiere in official competition.