★★★★☆
Andrey Zvyagintsev’s first film in nine years turns a Chabrol thriller into a cold, exact and furious portrait of a Russian petite bourgeoisie looking the other way.
Russia, 2022. Gleb (Dmitriy Mazurov), a wealthy company boss, suspects his wife, Galina (Iris Lebedeva), of having an affair, and he is right. The shape of the story comes from Claude Chabrol’s La Femme infidèle (1969), but Zvyagintsev and his co-writer Simon Lyashenko have set it against the mobilisation for the war in Ukraine, the Z logos and patriotic billboards quietly gathering like Hitchcock’s birds. While Gleb attends to his marriage, he is also required to hand over 14 of his own employees for the front. The story of how these two plots dovetail is one of pure moral rot.
This is direct, uncompromising filmmaking from Zvyagintsev, working in exile and shooting in Latvia for the first time, and it’s clear why the Cannes jury gave him the Grand Prix for it. His regular cinematographer, Mikhail Krichman, films the couple’s expensive, muted interiors with a stillness that makes everything that happens inside them more alarming. The infidelity plot unfolds with near-clinical patience; the consequences, when they come, are swift and very hard to watch. The second half slows a little, but without ever loosening its grip.
Mazurov plays Gleb as a man used to buying his way out of anything, and Lebedeva gives Galina an inner life the film is careful not to explain away. Zvyagintsev’s lineage is clear: the guilt and the moral reckoning here are Dostoevsky’s, the domestic precision more like Kieślowski’s. He uses his fictional family to assess his country, and by the time the closing image is revealed the final diagnosis is unflinching, damning, and brutal.
Minotaur played at the London Film Festival; MUBI will release it in UK cinemas in 27 November 2026.