Minotaur is like a savory dish that serves up a complex, nourishing experience in the moment, but also feels strangely traditional and underwhelming when all is said and done.
It's set in the early days of Russia's ten-day "special operation", now in its fourth monstrous year. We're somewhere far from Moscow, in some provincial town with just enough industry to house wealthy bullies. One of these is factory owner Gleb (Dmitriy Mazurov), who receives two sets of inconvenient news. The first is the government's demand for 14 people who will be drafted for the invasion. The second is that his wife is cheating on him.
Gleb's answer to both is remarkably similar. There is no tactic like an underhanded tactic, and we quickly witness how easily deception comes to him. After all, what's another person's life in the grand scheme of things, especially when the government can just decide that more bodies are needed to power the machine that is Russia?
The title Minotaur references the Greek myth of the 14 sacrifices required for the monster. Only here, there are no innocents apart from the serfs sent to war. Everyone else is an accomplice, even the police who claim to investigate any wrongdoings. Writer/director Andrey Zvyagintsev paints a hopeless portrait of a society at war with everyone, especially itself. Every semblance of civility is a mask, and only the graffiti that marks the undercarriages of public places dares to speak the truth.
For the first hour, Minotaur remains riveting. It is fascinating to see how clinically evil Gleb's existence is, and how easily this banality comes to him. His wife, Galina (Iris Lebedeva), is beautiful, smart, and hopelessly unhappy. For him, she's just another part of the property he needs to control. It doesn't matter that he's had affairs; hers is an affront that needs to be weeded out. Even his teenage son is a means to an end. A vessel that Gleb can instill his toxic worldview into for future generations, yet, strangely, the only time he actually speaks his mind and proposes direct action. Something that he refuses to follow out of principle.
It's in these moments, where Gleb's mask is the same one that Russia wears, that Minotaur is at its best. He is a beast pretending to be a man, and Mazurov plays the part beautifully. This is a person you wouldn't want to share a room with, even if you didn't know them. Watch how even his movements feel calculated, like he's constantly counting the steps required for the next betrayal.
But the further Minotaur goes, the more clinical and distant it gets, until it settles into an almost scientific study of corruption that feels almost conventional. Gleb's reaction to his wife's affair takes up much of the main narrative, as he pushes the lives of his sacrifices into the periphery, unwilling to even face them properly in a tremendously painful onboarding event.
The second half of the film isn't as strong as the first, which doesn't mean it's bad, either – far from it. But after an impressively claustrophobic setup, everything that follows feels looser, even contrived. We can see where Zvyagintsev wants his allegory to go, and Minotaur offers no surprises on the way there. Instead, it's simply classically efficient and well-handled, which has its own charms.
Perhaps I expect more from Zvyagintsev, who is a tremendous filmmaker that we don't see enough on the big screen. His ability to observe the inner workings of his exiled homeland and the darkness within toxic men remains unmatched. It's just this time, there is so much to say that Minotaur's vast scope and implications end up cut short. What a compliment such a shortcoming can be.
