‘Minotaur’ Evaluation: Andrey Zvyagintsev’s Masterful Crime Thriller Is Additionally a Daring Indictment of Russia’s Struggle Towards Ukraine

Minotaur could allude to a Greek delusion, be loosely primarily based on a movie by Claude Chabrol (The Untrue Spouse), and characterize the primary work director Andrey Zvyagintsev (The Return, Leviathan) has made solely outdoors Russia. (Shot in Latvia, it’s formally a French-German-Latvia co-production.) However it’s about as Russian as a movie might be. It’s as Russian as horseradish vodka, forest steppe marmots, and the phrase toska, a Russian time period that connotes a profound melancholy whose many shades Vladimir Nabokov mentioned couldn’t be captured in English, however which vary from “great spiritual anguish” to “physical or metaphysical dissatisfaction, a sense of longing, a dull anguish, a preying misery, a gnawing mental ache.”

This rigorously well-made, grippy-as-a-live-squid, toska-steeped work is Zvyagintsev’s most overtly crucial commentary on the motherland’s present political, religious and ethical malaise, a denunciation by no means mentioned in so many phrases however expressed with intricate layers of irony.

Furthermore, this has the potential to achieve a far wider viewers than virtually any of Zvyagintsev’s earlier works. Extra dramatically concise than his final, the mercilessly miserable Loveless, and, for all its profoundly Russian sensibility and reference, extra accessible than Leviathan, Minotaur appears to be like squarely on the monster in the midst of the maze: the struggle — oh, sorry, Russia calls it a “special military operation” — in opposition to Ukraine, which is believed to have taken the lives of round 325,000 troopers, with casualties conservatively estimated to be within the area of 1.2 to 2 million.

Even when that battle has been edged off the entrance and residential pages of the world’s media, it’s the unignorable entity that may’t be separated from any dialogue of Russia and that area, not like a number of the many different smaller invasions and conflicts that had been barely talked about in Twenty first-century Russian-made, Russian-set or Russian-language cinema up till 2022. Within the West, opinions of Belorussian-born, Ukraine- and German-based director Sergey Loznitsa’s 2018 drama Donbass (which additionally performed in competitors in Cannes) needed to include explanations of what Russia’s navy invaders, the “little green men,” had been doing within the Ukrainian province of the title, a battle few outdoors the area had been monitoring.

A lot has modified since then, and that’s painfully true for Zvyagintsev himself, who now lives in exile in France. As he’s shared widely within the lead as much as Minotaur’s debut in Cannes, he was stricken in 2020 with a horrific case of COVID that landed him in a coma for some time after which left him briefly unable to maneuver when Russia invaded Ukraine in February 2022. Chillingly, Minotaur takes place in an unnamed Russian metropolis round when that invasion started, though at first the particular navy operation is simply one thing occurring within the background. One of many first instances we see the movie’s protagonist, transport firm CEO Gleb Morozov (Dmitriy Mazurov), at work, he’s quietly gesturing to his colleague, HR head Natasha (Varvara Zmykova), that she finest click on away from the information report she’s watching on her laptop computer displaying the shelling of Ukrainian cities.

In a while, he shall be instructed by the town’s mayor (Vladimir Friedman) to submit the names of 14 males from his workforce to ship to the navy “recruiters,” individuals who shall be shipped straight to the entrance with barely any ample gear or safety — a degree that, had been this talked about in a movie made in Russia itself, might find yourself getting the filmmakers arrested. Zvyagintsev and his group (he’s been reunited with a lot of his common key collaborators, together with DP Mikhail Krichman, manufacturing designers Masha Slavina and Andrey Ponkratov, and composers Evgeni and Sasha Galperine, all of whom now dwell overseas) have by no means been this overtly crucial of Vladimir Putin’s regime, and one fears for his or her security after this.

Once more, something to do with the struggle appears to be like at first like a part of the story’s background, although that background slowly begins to return ahead because the story progresses, with messages and even characters showing on propagandistic billboards providing cash for volunteers to combat or celebrating fallen “heroes” in very Soviet-sounding Russian. Nothing is random or unintentional right here, not even the background figures we see on the street with lacking limbs or wheelchairs, survivors maybe of the conflicts in Chechnya, Georgia or Donbass.

Gleb’s thoughts is occupied by a battle a lot nearer to dwelling, between him and his spouse Galina (Iris Lebedeva), who has change into noticeably distracted, smiling at messages on her cellphone, supposedly going to the hairdresser on the town solely to return again with a coif that’s a lot the identical as when she went. (They dwell in an expensive, trendy home with acres of tall home windows, just like the luxurious unfold in Zvyagintsev’s Elena, within the rural outskirts of city.)

Whereas Galina dutifully attends to her wifely and maternal duties — she and Gleb have a teenage son named Seryosha (Boris Kudrin) — Gleb can sense one thing’s up. He has his head of safety Nikolai (Mikhail Samodakhov) do some non-public investigation on the facet, and shortly the proof comes again that she’s sleeping with a photographer who lives in an condominium on the dishonest facet of city, in a rundown social housing property. It’s the sort of neighborhood the place, even though there are tons of of items wanting onto a typical little bit of scruffy wasteland, nobody is ever hanging out on their balconies aside from the occasional smoker. This lack of neighborly curiosity makes it remarkably simple for individuals to satisfy a really Russian sort of demise, by defenestration or falling from excessive locations.

This overview could have already given away a little bit an excessive amount of, however excessive locations and plummeting are necessary particulars on this story. Images likewise characteristic considerably, particularly ones that seize characters we all know however are seen within the footage at a a lot youthful age, or transfigured by moments of pleasure or erotic abandon. The snapshots change into totems of misplaced happiness, in addition to truth-exposing clues. The script, credited to new collaborator Simon Lyashenko and Zvyagintsev and tailored freely from Chabrol’s 1969 thriller, wastes nothing, not even a throwaway remark at a restaurant dinner that Gleb and Galina attend in regards to the final time Gleb cleaned his personal home. Equally economical and granularly detailed is a 20-minute sequence in the midst of the movie that’s ugly, comical and essential to the propulsion of the story.

In some methods, it looks like exile and a brush with demise have liberated or refined Zvyagintsev’s cinematic abilities. Whereas this runs 141 minutes, it by no means feels dragged out or bloated, which, in all honesty, one may need mentioned about a number of the director’s earlier, lesser works like The Banishment or Loveless. That is additionally Zvyagintsev’s first adaptation of pre-existing materials, however the remodeling feels extra like a jazz virtuoso overlaying one other artist’s tune, tweaking the rhythm, altering the important thing, and discovering within the melody an entire new set of emotions.

As for toska – Minotaur explores so many shades of unhappiness, from the devastation of loss, to a powerlessness within the face of state authority (an excellent near-final scene that includes troopers transport out), to the foreboding sense, in an airplane far above fluffy photogenic clouds, that issues, as dangerous as they might appear now, are about to get even worse than you thought attainable.