Andrey Zvyagintsev’s Minotaur, playing at BFI London Film Festival, grippingly adapts Claude Chabrol’s La Femme Infidèle (The Unfaithful Wife) while relocating the action from France to Russia in 2022, just as President Vladimir Putin launched the full-scale invasion of Ukraine.
It’s been nine years since Andrey Zvyagintsev’s last feature, Loveless, a bleak portrayal of a bitterly separated couple forced together again after their son goes missing from their family home. During that time, the Russian auteur suffered a long battle with Covid, during which he was placed in an induced coma in Germany and lost the ability to walk, sit up, or speak for months. At the same time as his rehabilitation began, Russia invaded Ukraine, and Zvyagintsev made the decision not to return to his home country, instead relocating to Paris, where he currently resides with his family. Explaining his decision in an interview with the Guardian at Cannes, he said, “I don’t want to be associated with what my country has done”.
This dissonance sets the scene for his latest film, Minotaur, an adaptation of Claude Chabrol’s La Femme Infidèle (The Unfaithful Wife). Zvyagintsev and co-writer Simon Lyashenko took the outline of Chabrol’s film and relocated it from France to Russia in 2022, just as President Vladimir Putin launched the full-scale invasion. In doing so, they have created another deeply sinister film, like Loveless and his 2014 political drama Leviathan, where domesticity reflects corruption in modern-day Russia whilst cleverly alluding to the Greek myth in the title.
Minotaur centres on Gleb (Dimitry Mazurov) and Galina (Iris Lebedeva), an affluent couple who live in a sleek, modernist house on the outskirts of a fictional Russian town, with their vacant teenage son who spends time playing basketball in the pouring rain or scrolling on his iPad with headphones in. As the film opens, longtime cinematographer and collaborator Mikhail Krichman portrays the family’s domestic life through static, meticulous compositions of their house, as though it’s less a well-lived home than an empty vessel that reflects Gleb and Galina’s cordial but passionless relationship.
Gleb is the CEO of a successful shipping company and strives to maintain a strong reputation in town, as well as long-standing connections with the local mayor. Crucially, the mayor (a loyal supporter of Putin who has a framed photo of him displayed proudly in his office) has been asked by Moscow to draft more men for war, and Gleb needs 14 employees to meet the required quota. And if you know your Greek mythology, King Minos required the sacrifice of 14 young virgins – men and women equally – who were fed to the Minotaur in the labyrinth.
Meanwhile, there are distanced shots of Galina texting away at home, at a coffee shop, and perhaps more revealingly, seen in the background getting into a taxi rather hastily as well as, in one of Zvyagintsev’s famed long-takes, walking round the corner before immediately peeping behind the wall and darting across the road in the opposite direction to where Gleb dropped him off, unfazed.
The film unfurls like a gripping Hitchcockian thriller in these early passages, as Zvyagintsev’s editing offers little glimpses of interaction, foreshadowing the eventual reveal that Galina is cheating on him. Iris Lebedeva is exceptional as Galina, a woman whose intentions are, to an extent, understandable (it’s revealed early that Gleb has committed some infidelities in the past, explaining why their marriage has ended coldly). Still, she is completely detached from the horrors unfurling across the border due to her opaque lifestyle.
As the film moves into its second hour, Zvyagintsev tightens the screws further as Gleb acts on his cowardice with vicious, evil intent. The sound design is chilling as everyday sounds of dogs barking, vacuous pop music on the car radio, and children laughing and playing become intertwined with industrial sounds of trains carrying legions of tanks to the front line and Russian military marches. In addition, the score by composers Evgueni and Sacha Galperine is used sparsely but, when deployed, is incredibly unsettling, particularly a staccato piano that prickles the ear. Later, Gleb aggressively embraces Galina in bed like a beast reclaiming its prize, and combined with that musical motif, it’s nothing short of haunting.
Crucially, the background of the Russian-Ukraine war comes to the foreground with brutal effect. As soldiers are waved off in buses to the accompanying tears of close relatives, Zvyagintsev reminds us that regardless of whether it’s police, politicians, CEOs or mayors, there is a systemic rot at the heart of authoritarianism that permeates through multiple facets of society. Just last month, Zvyagintsev was added to the Russian list of foreign agents, despite his pleas at Cannes in May to “Put an end to the slaughter”. In Minotaur, he portrays how this kind of attritional war needs constant feeding. It’s grim but brilliantly gripping to watch.
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