NZIFF: Minotaur

A classic French psychosexual thriller about infidelity is expertly reimagined within a modern Russia of citizens feeding an inhuman war machine, in director-in-exile Andrei Zvyagintsev’s taut, chilling Cannes winner.

It’s been nearly a decade since director Andrei Zvyagintsev’s last feature. His sleek, ice-cold noir, Grand Prix winner at Cannes, is set in a Russia returned to its most brutal imperialist ways.

The regime is hungry for cannon fodder for its war on Ukraine, and Gleb (Dmitriy Mazurov), a businessman in a provincial town, must contend with the mayor’s demand for a list of disposable employees to help fill military draft numbers.

What’s more, Gleb’s suspicions that his wife (Iris Lebedeva) is having an affair are confirmed (in a remake of Claude Chabrol’s 1969 The Unfaithful Wife). Her deep discontentment with her affluent but shallow existence is more than his ego can absorb. His family’s high-end lifestyle of top restaurants and luxury vacations has been a bubble detached from political realities.

But the violence and self-serving corruption underpinning power in the nation bleeds through every corner of their lives; a spectacularly monstrous, abject horror that can be repressed no longer. Zvyagintsev, who has lived in exile in France since 2022, shot the film in Latvia, standing in for Russia.

NZ Classification TBC

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