“A slow burn political thriller that delivers a scathing verdict on a society that is rotten to the core”

Money and connections are everything. Even living in a relatively small (unnamed) city in Russia, as a CEO of a transport company Gleb (Dmitriy Mazurov) can live a very comfortable life with his wife Galina (Iris Lebedeva) and son Seryozha (Boris Kudrin). They can afford a beautiful home in the woods and lavish dinners with friends. But that doesn’t mean that Gleb doesn’t have problems. Russia is waging war in Ukraine, and Russia must beeld for it, Gleb too. His company has to offer up a sacrifice for the war effort like everybody else; the army requires fourteen names, fourteen employees of his company, and he better deliver them by Friday. With several employees already leaving the country in order to escape conscription, Gleb can’t afford to lose fourteen more. And that’s not his only worry, as he finds out Galina cheats on him too, with freelance photographer Anton (Yuriy Zavalnyouk). When he confronts Anton at the latter’s Soviet-style apartment, an impulsive reaction puts Gleb’s plush life in jeopardy.

Half family drama centered around a crime passionnel, half naked critique of Russia’s rampant corruption in which the ‘haves’ can get away with anything while the ‘have nots’ are sent to the front, Andreï Zviaguintsev’s latest, Minotaur, is a slow burn political thriller that takes a little too long in the run-up to two pivotal scenes that define the fate of this family, but delivers a scathing verdict on a society that is rotten to the core, in which Mother Russia is likened to a mythological monster. In Greek mythology, the people of Athens were forced to sacrifice fourteen people to the Minotaur, half man, half bull, every nine years; the amount of employees Gleb has to send to the front and basically condemn to death is not chosen randomly. In a society that is corrupted to the core, Gleb’s solution is simple: hire fourteen new employees, and put them on the ‘death list’ the next day. And when you need to get rid of those who may know your secrets, like the security officer who shadowed your cheating wife, you can always swap him out for another name on the list; when you do it for the young guy you can even feel good about yourself.

The most tragic character in Minotaur is probably Gleb’s wife Galina. It would be easy to blame her for her extra-marital affair, but she is in a loveless (no reference to Zviaguintsev’s previous film) marriage where she is expected to play her role as housewife and be happy with it. She is not, wanting more out of life than trips to a hair salon or nail studio, or dinners with the same friends, some of which exchange girlfriends like they do cars. In the first of two crucial scenes at Anton’s studio apartment we see her joy for probably the only time in the film, in a playful tryst that Zviaguintsev masterfully directs. Starting from a coy Galina teasing her lover on the bed, his photo camera snapping away at the increasingly naked Galine, Zviaguintsev’s camera slowly pans around the apartment for a full 360 to end up on the two lovers fully engaged in foreplay. It’s the one moment where the film truly heats up (the one other possible moment being Galina drinking her despair away in a bar when she realizes Anton is gone), because otherwise Minotaur is a cold, or rather chilling film. The second key scene at Anton’s apartment follows not much later, when Gleb shows up and in an impulsive act kills his rival-in-romance. The extended aftermath in which he frantically tries to cover his tracks is the one time where Gleb’s life threatens to completely fall apart. When he faces the heat regarding this incident later on in the film, his connections help him out of his predicament; the rule of law has long been replaced by might-makes-right in good old Mother Russia.

While Minotaur centres on the martial problems between Gleb and Galina, the ‘special military operation’ in Ukraine is never far away. While the film makes no direct commentary in the conflict, Minotaur uses it to underline that the war is only for the underprivileged: if you have the right connections and enough money, you can keep the frontline far away from you. After dinner with friends at a high-class restaurant Denis, one of Gleb and Galina’s friends, says he will leave for Thailand until “all of this blows over.” These semi-oligarchs have nothing to worry about, but without blinking decide over life and death when they send other people to that distant frontline, where they can be celebrated as heroes of the nation, and also be forgotten, as the final shot of the film so poignantly underlines.

Shot in a wide format by Zviaguintsev’s regular DoP Mikhail Krichman, the film makes excellent use of space, with Zviaguintsev’s compositional work of exceptionally high quality. He knows when to move a shot’s action to the edge of the frame and when to keep it centered, which makes for a natural flow within and between scenes. The music by brothers Evgueni and Sacha Galperine further adds to the tension, emphasizing the slow burn character of the film. Performances are strong, with in particular Lebedeva being a standout, if only because the emotional range of her character offers her more to work with. All of this is in debt thought to Zviaguintsev’s precision in direction. The pace of the film is somewhat off in the first act, making the film probably 20 minutes too long, but once the ball starts rolling and Gleb’s impulses get the better of him, Minotaur becomes a feverish but utterly controlled run to the end, all the while never letting the political sub-commentary out of sight. It’s been nine years since Zviaguintsev’s last film Loveless, and he had to overcome severe illness in that time, but he is back and still has the fire inside of him.