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You can tell a lot about a filmmaker from the way they dispose of a corpse. In “The Unfaithful Wife” (1969), a coolly unsettling drama of adultery and murder, Claude Chabrol tidied a crime scene with the kind of brisk elegance that earned him the sobriquet the French Hitchcock. The room was clean within moments, and the body itself was swiftly wrapped up, driven away, and, after some pulse-quickening car trouble, dumped in a pond. Contrast this with an equivalent sequence in “Minotaur,” a mesmerizing new retelling of Chabrol’s story from the Russian director Andrey Zvyagintsev, who is not one to hurry things along. As the culprit scrubs at a bloodstain that seems to grow smearier with every wipe, the camera looks on for what feels like an eternity, with a silent but unmistakable disdain. Have we taken on the perspective of the victim’s ghost? Or is Zvyagintsev merely reminding us that messes are harder to mop up than the movies usually suggest? (At one point, I almost blurted out to the killer, “You missed a spot!”)
“The Unfaithful Wife” has already inspired a steamy Hollywood remake, “Unfaithful” (2002), by the British director Adrian Lyne. It’s best remembered for Diane Lane’s sensational performance as the inaptly named Constance, a housewife who is flung, by a freakish gust of wind, into the path of her future lover. Desire really is a force of nature. The weather in “Minotaur,” by contrast, is gloomy but unobtrusive; Zvyagintsev’s storms are of a more interior kind. Certainly Galina (Iris Lebedeva), the Constance in this story, is not a woman to be knocked off her feet. She has a sleek, sharply planed beauty that matches that of her home, a lakeside house on the outskirts of a fictional Russian city called Krasnoborsk, where she lives with her husband, Gleb (Dmitry Mazurov), and their teen-age son, Seryozha (Boris Kudrin). The house is a gleaming mid-century-modern affair, spartan in its good taste, with tall windows that peer out invitingly onto gold-flecked woods. Yet it’s the view from outside, looking in, that compels Zvyagintsev’s attention; he makes the unexpected case for himself here as the Russian Hitchcock, alert to the voyeuristic byplay of seeing and being seen. Early on, Gleb spies Galina through the glass as she stands in the darkness of their kitchen, smiling down at her text messages. He can see, by the glow of her phone screen, that their marriage is in trouble.
He has likely known for some time. An air of frosty detachment, deeper than the autumn chill, seems to follow Galina from room to room. A dinner with two other couples—a sad attempt by Gleb to bring back happier times—backfires spectacularly; the bitterness of other people’s relationships will do nothing to sweeten theirs. During a heated bedroom argument, Galina unloads on her husband for his past infidelities, what she calls his “little girlfriends”—a novel twist, not to be found in the Chabrol or the Lyne, and one that makes it difficult to begrudge Galina her mode of retaliation. For some time now, she has been sleeping with Anton (Yuriy Zavalnyouk), a divorced photographer, who has an impressive build, a studio apartment in the city, and a wall decked with sexy snapshots of his new paramour. Gleb, a man whose doughy good looks hide a steely resolve, finds all this out in due course. He is the C.E.O. of a logistics company, and he tasks his head of security (Mihails Samodahovs) with spying on Galina and confirming his worst suspicions. That detail, too, is a canny departure from “The Unfaithful Wife” and “Unfaithful,” in which the husbands enlisted the outside help of private investigators. Gleb has enormous resources at his disposal, and the puppet-master authority that he wields both at work and at home is, you sense, precisely what Galina is rebelling against.
“Minotaur,” then, is the most corrosive version of this material imaginable, less the tale of a good marriage gone awry than that of a rotten one getting worse, plus something more: an icy study in the mechanics, and the erotics, of corruption and power. As ever with Zvyagintsev, who wrote the script with Simon Lyashenko, the pessimism isn’t limited to the domestic sphere. It’s the fall of 2022, and the grim consequences of Russia’s months-long assault on Ukraine are everywhere. On phones and computers, we see residential buildings being bombed and Russian cars fleeing toward the traffic-choked Georgian border. On the streets, billboards glorify the military’s efforts, even as some local graffiti (“FUCK YOUR WAR”) testifies to pervasive, if largely hidden, discontent. Gleb’s company is about to suffer the effects of the conflict in a particularly pernicious way. Krasnoborsk’s mayor (Vladimir Friedman) has ordered the city’s major employers to submit lists of male workers—the more physically fit the better—to be drafted into what Russia, avoiding the W-word, is calling its “special military operation.”
Gleb must provide fourteen men, a number that brings the film’s title, with its reference to Greek mythology, into crystalline focus. The Minotaur demanded that fourteen young noblemen and noblewomen be delivered to his labyrinthine lair, and Zvyagintsev’s film duly traps Gleb within his own moral maze. Faced with parallel dilemmas, one personal and one professional, he can address them, finally, only with the same banal disregard for human life. He may be a lesser monster than Putin, glimpsed here in a framed photograph on the mayor’s wall, but unquestioning complicity has made a monster of him nonetheless—one who profits from the blood of human sacrifice and perpetuates the most callous of the story’s innumerable betrayals.
Zvyagintsev, at sixty-two, has become a master at seeding the conventions of domestic melodrama with portents of sociopolitical catastrophe. It wasn’t always thus. His early features, including “The Return” (2003) and “The Banishment” (made in 2007 but not released here until 2018), were troubled-family sagas of a more spiritual than political bent, composed with a rapturous visual sublimity that earned lofty comparisons to the work of Andrei Tarkovsky. But Zvyagintsev’s pursuit of an uncompromising art-film purity could not, in the end, keep out an equal fascination with the malaise of modern life. In 2014, he directed “Leviathan,” about a husband and wife locked in a real-estate war with a small-town mayor, who, in his brutish overreach, clearly stood in for his country’s authoritarian leaders of the past, present, and future. (A photograph of Putin hung on that mayor’s wall, too.) Next came “Loveless” (2017), a bruisingly sad drama about the disappearance of a child, neglected and unmourned by his soon-to-be-divorced parents—a couple so bitterly at odds as to make Gleb and Galina look like honeymooners. “Loveless,” perhaps the most nakedly metaphorical of Zvyagintsev’s works, built to a blunt, summative image of a woman, in a conspicuously Russia-branded tracksuit, running on a treadmill—fierce, enraged, and going nowhere fast.
All of which is to say that Zvyagintsev has been here before, even though his sense of “here” has shifted. In 2022, while recovering from complications of a COVID infection that nearly killed him, the director moved with his family from Moscow to Paris, where he lives in self-imposed exile. France, long a haven for dissident artists and intellectuals, proved specifically instrumental in the making of “Minotaur”—and not merely because of its Chabrol-supplied source material. The film, which was shot entirely in Latvia, was mostly financed by French companies; it will represent France in the upcoming Oscar race for Best International Feature. (Another Gallic feather in the film’s cap: “Minotaur” won the Grand Prix, or second place, at this year’s Cannes Film Festival.)
Nine years, many of them fraught and full of upheaval, have elapsed between this film and its predecessor, and yet the sense of continuity between them is remarkable. In “Loveless,” the vanished child was an emblem of a lost Russian generation, cruelly abandoned by its elders. In “Minotaur,” and specifically in Seryozha—an ordinary, somewhat moody, clearly well-loved teen-ager—Zvyagintsev allows us a more hopeful vision of the future. There’s a moment when Gleb, learning of a potential bully at school, advises the kid to “never strike the first blow,” advice that he himself will swiftly disregard. His son, it becomes clear, already has a better head on his shoulders. In the film’s final moments, the emphasis shifts away from the fragile wreckage of Gleb and Galina’s marriage and toward Seryozha—seated with his parents yet slightly apart from them, happily lost in the clouds. You want the best for him, and hope that the only messes he’ll have to clean up are his own. ♦