He was close to death when Russia invaded Ukraine. This film is his response

Against a backdrop of domestic murder, Minotaur director Andrey Zvyagintsev rages against the Russian regime. This time, they won’t mistake the message.

Andrey Zvyagintsev, generally recognised as Russia’s greatest living film director, was immobilised in a Hamburg hospital bed when Russia invaded Ukraine. It was 2022; he had contracted a severe case of COVID, then reacted so badly to the Sputnik vaccine that German doctors put him into a medically induced coma for two weeks. When he woke up, he was paralysed and could barely breathe. Over the year it took for him to recover, he resolved that he would not even try to return to Russia. As he told The Guardian, “I don’t want to be associated with what my country has done”.

Meanwhile, he was planning a new life. When he was well enough, he moved with his wife and son to France. As luck would have it, his son had gone to the French school in Moscow and speaks the language. Zvyagintsev doesn’t, but he feels an attachment to France as the birthplace of cinema. He started seeking funding for his next film.

Minotaur, which has just won the Grand Prix at the Cannes Film Festival, weaves together a premise taken from a French film from 1969 – Claude Chabrol’s An Unfaithful Wife – and Zvyagintsev’s controlled rage at the state of Russia.

Like Chabrol’s original film, which Zvyagintsev describes as classical, it is structured around a man’s discovery of his wife’s infidelity, a murder, and the extended business of getting rid of a body. In Zvyagintsev’s version, that single monstrous act is both mirrored and diminished by the daily brutality of bad government. Without civilised restraint, the rules of a classic story of crime and punishment no longer hold; Zvyagintsev’s version of the story derails to reach a very different ending.

The film was shot in Riga, Latvia, doubling for a fictional Russian city called Krasnoborsk. Gleb (Dmitriy Mazurov) owns a manufacturing company; his wife Galina (Iris Lebedeva) is a career consumer who appears to spend most of her time at the hairdresser’s. That impression is dispelled a few minutes into the film, when Gleb correctly senses that she is having an affair. He duly hires a private detective.

Like Zvyagintsev’s awakening, Gleb’s personal crisis coincides with President Vladimir Putin’s launch of the so-called “special operation” against Ukraine in September 2022 that put his country on a war footing. Gleb is summoned to a meeting with the local mayor, a Putin toady who has been charged with forcing local companies to nominate employees for conscription, each firm being