Critic Reviews

The performances from Mazurov and Lebedeva are outstanding, and Zvyagintsev’s direction is superb with his cold daylit compositions and scenes in grim streets and housing estates. Everything here looks like a crime scene.

Teeming with rage, despair, elastic metaphor and darkest gallows humor, Minotaur is very much up to the task.

It’s an ancient tale told within a chilling, new context that poses an inevitable question. What kind of man is able to make it out of the minotaur’s elaborate maze alive? In the legend, that was impossible, but in a modern context, the answer is even more disturbing.

Minotaur isn’t the best movie of Zvyagintsev’s career, but the icily exacting power of his filmmaking is undeniable — and it sucks you in like a vortex. Rarely are you so glued to a tale you’ve heard so many times before. Andrey Zvyagintsev, welcome back. We missed, and we need you.

Minotaur is searingly political yet controlled and understated, maintaining a cold grip on its narrative as the world around it descends into chaos. Urgent and restrained, personal and political, it is one of the more pointed films about the present state of the world in recent memory.

This rigorously well-made, grippy-as-a-live-squid, toska-steeped work is Zvyagintsev’s most openly critical commentary on the motherland’s current political, spiritual and moral malaise, a denunciation never said in so many words but expressed with intricate layers of irony.

Morbidly humorous and shot with such patience as to conjure its latent anxieties up to the surface, Minotaur is a thriller about how the personal always intertwines with the political, and the damning reality that we can never deal with one crisis at a time.

Minotaur sees Zvyagintsev set his own deliciously ink-black stamp on Chabrol’s erotic thriller; indeed, for the majority of its runtime, Zvyagintsev deliberately flattens both the eroticism and the thrills – a carefully judged gambit that allows scenes of nudity and murder to land with greater force when they finally arrive.

In retrospect, there’s a kind of audacity to the film’s oscillating sprawl. Zvyagintsev is making space for a bourgeois love triangle against the backdrop of a war that’s blotted out everything else, and where domestic stories of such scale, in some fundamental sense, hardly matter. It is this cognitive dissonance that makes Minotaur such a fascinating oddity.

Minotaur is another unmistakably political, bleak, and methodical work from one of our best storytellers.