Closing Gala: Minotaur

Long live cinema: Andrey Zvyagintsev is back.

Following his last film, Loveless (R&A 2017), the director, known for his incisive social criticism and brutally perceptive films, fought for his life after falling seriously ill during the COVID-19 pandemic and was forced into exile from his native Russia following the outbreak of the war.

Although his latest film, Minotaur, was produced entirely outside Russia, beyond the reach of censorship, its subject is unmistakably the present-day state of Putin’s Russia – and Zvyagintsev’s critical gaze is sharper than ever. Russian society, the war of aggression and corruption are examined, in characteristically Zvyagintsevian fashion, through the lens of a toxic marriage.

In Minotaur, Zvyagintsev loosely transposes the twisted love triangle of Claude Chabrol’s erotic thriller The Unfaithful Wife (1969) to contemporary Russia. The Russian social context lends the story chilling new dimensions, along with darkly comic undertones.

Minotaur became a critics’ favorite at the Cannes Film Festival and won the festival’s second-highest prize, the Grand Prix, from the jury. At R&A, it will screen as the festival’s closing film. This is the kind of film that stays with you long after the curtain falls – perhaps all the way until the next festival.

Inari Ylinen