‘Minotaur’ Cannes Review: Andrey Zvyagintsev Returns With A Chabrol Remake That Trades French Elegance For Russian Dread

If, somewhere around the midpoint of Minotaur, you have the nagging feeling you have seen this film before, you probably have. The new feature from Russian director Andrey Zvyagintsev is a remake of Claude Chabrol’s 1969 classic La Femme Infidèle, which Hollywood revisited in 2002 as Unfaithful, Adrian Lyne’s version starring Richard Gere and Diane Lane. What Zvyagintsev brings to the material are his own particular sensibility, his characteristic internal logic, and a contemporary Russian context that meaningfully reshapes the story.

Bitter, dry, and cold — like everything this director makes — the film concerns a couple whose relationship looks as though it were assembled from a luxury advertisement. They live in an enormous, beautiful house on a lake. They have a son who gives them no particular trouble. And yet there is almost no warmth between them, no spontaneous gesture of affection, nothing that resembles intimacy. His name is Gleb (Dmitriy Mazurov), and he runs a shipping company. It is 2022 in Russia, and the country’s military is mobilizing across multiple fronts — Georgia, Ukraine, and beyond. Gleb is caught between two workplace pressures at once: a wave of resignations from employees considering leaving the country, and a directive from above to compile a list of staff to be sent to the front.

The second front opens closer to home. His wife Galina (Iris Lebedeva) — who cooks, takes their son Seriosha (Boris Kudrin) to school, and maintains the household’s elegant surface — is clearly living some other life on the side. It soon becomes apparent that she is involved with a photographer named Anton, and that this relationship is the only thing pulling her out of the existential dread that the comfort and routine of her marriage has done nothing to relieve.

Anyone who has seen even one thriller built around adultery will know this cannot end well. And around the midpoint, it doesn’t. From there the film shifts into a different mode — more methodical, more explicitly thriller-adjacent, with characters making plans, concealing evidence, and carefully guarding what they know. Call it noir in a Russian key, but noir nonetheless.

What distinguishes this version from its predecessors is, to a degree, the political landscape surrounding it. Gleb’s working life is saturated with the pressures of war — the weight of deciding who gets sent to fight is not incidental to his character but central to it. And the old habits of corruption and privilege have not gone anywhere: in this world, as the film makes quietly clear, those with power have far more room to maneuver than everyone else. Zvyagintsev lets this context accumulate slowly through the film’s first hour, then allows it to press in on the story once Gleb learns the truth about his wife.

The familiarity of the premise notwithstanding, Minotaur — Zvyagintsev’s sixth feature and his first since 2017, after a near-fatal bout with COVID — maintains the rigorous, unsparing, and slightly airless aesthetic that defines his work, along with the persistent sense that nothing can go particularly well for anyone here, or that if it does, some cosmic joke is already being prepared. As the family tries to adjust to a new reality built on secrets and lies, soldiers keep shipping out to Ukraine, falling at the front, and being replaced by others. The cycle of destruction doesn’t stop. And hope, more than anything else, is just a private arrangement between people who know better.