Minotaur premieres – Andrey Zvyagintsev—who nearly died in 2021 amid COVID complications—makes his long-awaited return with “Minotaur,” a bleak, politically charged drama that premiered at the 2026 Cannes Film Festival and will arrive on Mubi later this year.
Andrey Zvyagintsev nearly died in 2021 after COVID complications—and then, against the odds, came back to life. Now he’s back on the screen with “Minotaur,” a film that doesn’t offer comfort so much as it tightens the vise.
The comeback lands at a moment when the director’s style—already unmistakable through “Leviathan” and “Loveless”—feels less like a return to a familiar voice and more like a sharpening of it. “Minotaur” is a dark. hopeless story of betrayal and inevitability. built for an audience that knows the genre rules and feels the dread anyway.
Zvyagintsev’s film draws from Claude Chabrol’s 1969 erotic thriller “The Unfaithful Wife. ” which later inspired Adrian Lyne’s 2022 adaptation “Unfaithful. ” starring Diane Lane. In “Minotaur. ” the setup is chillingly recognizable: a feckless. selfish man spirals into a dark rabbit hole after learning his wife is having an affair.
The situation is anything but fresh in plot mechanics. but the movie’s force comes from where Zvyagintsev moves the camera. In “Minotaur. ” the inevitable violence of a cuckolding noir story is repositioned inside a Russia that feels poisoned at street level—autumn 2022. Russia mobilizing into Ukraine. and a town where bombings are reaching people through social media feeds.
Gleb Morozov (Dmitriy Mazurov) is the CEO of a shipping company, living in a modernist suburb home made of glass, steel, fine wood, and concrete. For him, daily life is fenced off from the larger chaos—until the mayor orders him to assemble a list of employees to be drafted into service.
At home, his wife Galina (Iris Lebedeva) is marked by emptiness. She is an unemployed housewife whose routine centers on getting their son Seriosha (Boris Kudrin) to school on time. Her day fills with the labor of birthday logistics—getting the right presents. ordering the right food for his birthday party—until the film reveals what has been hollowing her out from the inside.
Galina is having an affair with Anton (Yuriy Zavalnyouk), a 33-year-old photographer. She visits him almost daily under the guise of yet another appointment. using the relationship as an escape from a life that otherwise becomes waiting—waiting for husband and son to come home. waiting in a void that never empties.
Lebedeva plays Galina with a tight, elegant pressure—less like a doomed heroine in the mold of Chabrol, and more like someone carved out of Antonioni’s universe of ennui. There’s the forcefield quality of her secrecy, the furtive glee of keeping something hidden in plain sight.
It’s also no mystery to the audience that Gleb has a history of infidelity and jealousy—and that he’s going to find out what she’s up to. What keeps “Minotaur” from feeling like just another variation on the same old story is how relentlessly it threads that private betrayal into Russia’s political moment. The film offers no reassurance. and it leans on a bleak. coldly observing atmosphere that seems to insist the personal and the political can’t be separated.
That mood is reinforced by the decision to shoot outside Russia. “Minotaur” was actually shot in Latvia, after “the days of shooting politically trenchant material in Russia are done,” the film’s production context makes clear.
Mikhail Krichman, cinematographer on all Zvyagintsev’s films, returns with a glacial, widescreen gaze. The camera doesn’t merely witness; it invites scrutiny—especially in a hypnotizing 360-shot that begins with Galina and Anton day-drinking and then getting into bed. The same shot returns them to an unchanged postcoital position, as if time itself refuses to intervene.
Composers Evgueni and Sacha Galperine provide a worrying score that presses down instead of lifting. Zvyagintsev leans into red herrings and bitter visual jokes, including a tiny picture of Putin hanging over a boardroom. There are detectives who eventually show up at Gleb and Galina’s house—then look at serious hard evidence that could solve their wild goose case and instead decide to go to lunch.
The film’s last shot doesn’t resolve the emotional account. Instead, it leaves a lingering refusal to let the viewer settle into any easy mental shelter.
There’s an unbearable rhythm to it: what begins as a familiar noir setup gets pulled into the atmosphere of wartime mobilization—draft lists. bombings on social feeds. and a home that becomes its own dark state. Even when the characters cling to comforting falsities, the movie keeps showing what those lies cost.
In the performances, the film finds moments of raw life inside its allegory. When Lebedeva’s Galina has not heard back from Anton for at least 24 hours and then drinks an entire bottle of wine at a bar. she erupts—berating her son and husband for ordering the same old shit for dinner every night when she’s not cooking. Margherita pizza, margherita pizza. “Where is me?” she yells. The husband. meanwhile. has been instructing their son how to bash in the faces of bullies who come at him at school.
“Minotaur” may not be the best film of Zvyagintsev’s career, but its icily exacting power is undeniable—and it pulls you in with the force of a vortex. The movie ends without hope, without easy resolution, and with images that stick.
“Minotaur” premiered at the 2026 Cannes Film Festival. Mubi will release the film later this year.
Grade: A-
Andrey Zvyagintsev Minotaur 2026 Cannes Film Festival Mubi Iris Lebedeva Dmitriy Mazurov Yuriy Zavalnyouk Boris Kudrin Mikhail Krichman Evgueni Galperine Sacha Galperine Claude Chabrol The Unfaithful Wife Unfaithful Adrian Lyne Diane Lane