Zvyagintsev's 'Minotaur' Premieres at Cannes 2026
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- Andrey Zvyagintsev's 'Minotaur' premiered at the 2026 Cannes Film Festival, his first feature in nine years after nearly dying from COVID complications in 2021.
- 'Minotaur' transplants Claude Chabrol's 1969 'The Unfaithful Wife' into a Russian suburb during the 2022 wartime mobilization, following shipping-company CEO Gleb Morozov (Dmitriy Mazurov) as he discovers wife Galina's affair with a younger photographer (Yuriy Zavalnyouk).
- Mubi acquired the film and will release it later in 2026.
- Production relocated to Latvia because, the review states, 'the days of shooting politically trenchant material in Russia are done.'
- Cinematographer Mikhail Krichman returns alongside composers Evgueni and Sacha Galperine for a glacially composed widescreen look, including a 360-degree shot of the affair's principals drinking into a postcoital stillness.
- Iris Lebedeva's turn as the unfulfilled Galina anchors the film, with the reviewer likening her less to a doomed Chabrol heroine than to an Antonioni figure—an ennui-struck housewife railing at her family for ordering margherita pizza night after night.
Why it matters: Zvyagintsev's comeback after near-death carries extra weight because his usual base—politically indicting Russian cinema—has become functionally impossible: 'Minotaur' had to shoot in Latvia. By filtering a classic cuckold noir through Russia's 2022 wartime mobilization, the director plants a domestic betrayal inside the machinery of a wartime state, with the review noting the 'tiny picture of Putin hanging over a boardroom' as his quiet political signature.
