by Hudson Moura
Andrey Zvyagintsev’s Minotaur is a sober and refined family drama unfolding against the disturbing background of war. A reworking of Claude Chabrol’s La Femme infidèle (The Unfaithful Wife, 1969), the film follows Gleb, a successful businessman whose apparently ordered life begins to fracture on two fronts. At work, he is forced to select employees who will be sent to government troops; at home, he becomes increasingly suspicious that his wife, Galina, is having an affair. While people around them become increasingly anxious, leave their jobs, or attempt to escape across the border into Georgia and other neighbouring countries, the film remains firmly anchored in the intimate space of the family.
This contrast is what gives Minotaur much of its power. Zvyagintsev never allows the war to become simply a dramatic backdrop, yet he also refuses to make it the film’s principal subject. Political anxiety, corruption, manipulation, and the proximity between business and government remain present throughout, recalling the social tensions of Leviathan and Loveless. Gleb’s position is especially revealing: he is not simply another citizen confronted with the consequences of war, but a man with enough institutional power to decide which of his employees may be sent into it. Yet even this disturbing responsibility does not displace the private drama that increasingly consumes him.
The film is particularly effective in the way it makes domestic space central to that tension. Gleb and Galina live in an almost impossibly immaculate house: minimalist, perfectly organized, integrated with its garden and the surrounding forest, almost like an idealized catalogue image. Yet beneath this visual order lies emotional disconnection. Galina appears increasingly isolated and bored within this beautiful environment, while Gleb’s growing suspicion transforms the home into a space of observation, distance, and unease. The contrast between the serenity of the architecture and the instability of the marriage is one of the film’s most precise visual ideas.
Zvyagintsev’s direction is patient without becoming slow, allowing the tension to accumulate gradually through gestures, silences, spaces, and changes in behaviour. The screenplay builds rather than announces its conflicts. Even when Gleb asks a security officer to follow Galina, the film avoids transforming itself into a conventional thriller. Suspicion is less important as a mechanism for generating plot than as a way of revealing the emotional distance already present within the marriage.
This is also where the connection with Chabrol becomes particularly productive. Minotaur takes the basic structure of marital infidelity and relocates it within a contemporary Russian society destabilized by war and political pressure. Yet the political context never overwhelms the personal story. Instead, public and private anxieties quietly reflect one another: a society marked by uncertainty and fear surrounds a marriage similarly governed by suspicion, loneliness, and emotional displacement.
What is most surprising is that the film ultimately seems less interested in power, status, or even betrayal than in love itself. Beneath Gleb’s jealousy and Galina’s affair lies a deeper sense of loneliness and the need for affection. Betrayal is therefore not treated simply as moral transgression but as a symptom of emotional absence. Both characters appear to be searching, in different ways, for a form of closeness that their marriage no longer easily provides.
This gives Minotaur an unusual emotional complexity. Gleb may possess wealth, authority, and proximity to political power, yet none of these things gives him control over the person closest to him. The film patiently dismantles the illusion that social position can protect an individual from vulnerability. In the end, the most destabilizing force in his life is not the war outside but the uncertainty inside his own home.
With its precise compositions, controlled rhythm, and refusal of melodramatic excess, Minotaur is a remarkably cohesive film. Zvyagintsev uses a seemingly familiar story of marital suspicion to explore something far more intimate: how loneliness, affection, jealousy, and love persist even when the world around us appears to be coming apart. The war may shape the atmosphere, but the real battlefield remains emotional.
Rating: 4.2/5