By Kat Guevara
Gleb looks at his son’s photograph of clouds from the plane window as the family escapes on vacation, their privilege still intact. Like the minotaur, he remains half man, half beast, momentarily lifted above the labyrinth called earth.
Andrey Zvyagintsev’s Minotaur, written by Simon Lyashenko and Zvyagintsev and based on Claude Chabrol’s The Unfaithful Wife, follows family man Gleb (Dmitriy Mazurov), who lives an immaculately bourgeois life quietly collapsing against the onset of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. Violence begins arriving at Gleb’s door in different forms. His son comes home with stories of a bully. At work, Gleb is ordered to dismiss employees, many of whom are left to enlist. Then comes news from an informant that his wife Galina (Iris Lebedeva) is having an affair with a younger photographer. What begins as separate fractures at home, at work and in the country slowly bleeds together, becoming increasingly challenging to compartmentalize.
Official Trailer:
For its first half, Minotaur is remarkably stripped down, much like the setting of the city that feels hallowed out. Recalling Leviathan and Loveless Zvyagintsev pares the film down to its most vital elements, where the lives of those in charge are told without excess. His wide shots turn sleek interiors into enclosures, holding his characters within circumstances they have, in part, helped construct around themselves. Glass recurs throughout these spaces. Gleb and those around him drink tea and wine from it, sit behind it in office cubicles and frame the world through it with a camera lens. A beautiful life remains outwardly intact, despite the upheaval around it.
Amputees appear among the few bodies that remain as reminders of the outcomes of war and of a reality Gleb has largely experienced at a distance. If the glass interiors allow him to look outward without fully confronting what is there, these figures make the consequences briefly impossible to abstract.
Gleb becomes the film’s mythological beast, wandering a maze partly of his own construction, dozing off after having dozed through an entire life. His instinct is to maintain his position, his identity and his way of living, even when that preservation comes at the expense of innocent people.
Zvyagintsev returns after nearly a decade with another masterpiece of a portrait of private ruin unfolding inside a much larger one.
Minotaur screens in Los Angeles on Nov. 30 in select theaters.
