Andrey Zvyagintsev’s Minotaur is moving deeper into the awards-season spotlight, with a trailer now available for the Cannes-winning political thriller ahead of its next major festival stop and theatrical release.
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The film, Zvyagintsev’s first made outside Russia, continues a familiar festival-to-awards path for the director while marking a significant shift in the circumstances behind his work. His previous two films, Leviathan and Loveless, both won prizes at the Cannes Film Festival before their North American premieres in Telluride and subsequent Oscar attention. Minotaur has now followed with Cannes acclaim, a Telluride showcase and entry into the American awards conversation.
But this time, the context is sharply different. Minotaur was produced in Latvia, which stands in for Russia in Zvyagintsev’s portrait of his homeland at the start of the Ukraine war. The film is not positioned as Russia’s submission for the international feature Oscar, as Leviathan and Loveless were when they received nominations. Instead, Minotaur is on France’s shortlist, with the selection committee meeting again this week to make its final decision.
The film also arrives after a nearly decade-long pause between features for Zvyagintsev, who previously said he nearly died of long COVID and was unable to physically move for a full year.
Minotaur is adapted from Claude Chabrol’s 1969 film The Unfaithful Wife, which also served as source material for Adrian Lyne’s erotic thriller Unfaithful. Zvyagintsev said he did not watch Lyne’s film in order to avoid clouding his own adaptation. His version keeps the core premise of a husband confronting the fallout of his wife’s infidelity, but relocates the story to 2022 and places the private unraveling against the pressure of wartime Russia.
The story follows Gleb, a powerful CEO played by Dmitriy Mazurov, as he becomes increasingly focused on signs that his wife, Galina, played by Iris Lebedeva, is having an affair. While watching her hidden smiles, secret messages and afternoon disappearances, Gleb is also being pushed by political forces to support the growing war effort. Around him, colleagues are leaving both his company and the country.
That collision of intimate crisis and larger national breakdown is central to Zvyagintsev’s approach. The director has long set personal dramas against broader social and political conditions, and his earlier work drew sharp reactions in Russia. More than a decade ago, Russian officials and activists described Leviathan as “evil” and “beyond all limits.”
For Minotaur, one of Zvyagintsev’s most significant departures from Chabrol’s film was expanding the husband’s professional world.
“Chabrol completely left out life in the office,” Zvyagintsev said. “What was this relationship that the main character had with his colleagues? What exactly is happening there? I needed to create it.”
The director also reshapes the source material by giving Galina more space to articulate her own position. Though the film is largely told through the husband’s perspective, Galina is allowed to speak for herself before the story collapses around the couple. In the trailer, she is heard saying, “I’m tired of being your shadow.”
“She is looking for love, sex, compassion, tenderness,” Zvyagintsev said. “I wanted to show Galina’s tragedy, what exactly was happening with her on the inside — what pushed her to cheat.”
Zvyagintsev has described Minotaur as not overtly political, but as a story whose setting naturally reflects his relationship to Chabrol’s premise. He was especially drawn to the film’s centerpiece: a wordless sequence lasting more than 15 minutes that changes the movie’s mood and direction.
At Telluride, Zvyagintsev said he watched one screening where the audience responded strongly to that sequence, particularly to its dark, understated humor.
“I didn’t really expect it — at that point, the American audience really started to laugh,” he said. “Just because of the mise-en-scène. And then they laughed again!”
The director has observed that Minotaur plays differently depending on the audience, while its themes of love, betrayal, loyalty and corruption remain central to its impact. The film also represents a new chapter for Zvyagintsev personally and professionally. A vocal critic of Russia’s actions in Ukraine, he moved to France after the war began, and he has acknowledged the symbolic weight of potentially representing France in the international Oscar race.
“I do understand: How will it feel for France to give their place to a Russian director?” Zvyagintsev said. “Me not yet being a French citizen, in the sense [of not having] a passport, but representing them — I would be very proud, and very grateful.”
What Happens Next?
Minotaur premieres Tuesday at the Toronto International Film Festival. The film is scheduled to be released in theaters on Nov. 20, while France’s committee is expected to make its final international feature Oscar submission decision after meeting again this week.