Overview
- Minotaur premiered at the Cannes Film Festival in May 2026 and received the festival’s Grand Prize, raising the film’s international profile ahead of MUBI distribution.
- The story follows a wealthy shipping executive pressured to meet military recruitment quotas during Russia’s 2022 mobilisation while he confronts his wife’s infidelity without revealing key plot twists.
- Zvyagintsev made the film in exile after leaving Russia in 2022 and shot it in Riga, Latvia, using remote self‑taped casting because many Russia‑based actors declined to risk participation.
- The director’s return to filmmaking follows a near‑fatal COVID illness and long recovery from Guillain‑Barré Syndrome, a personal arc critics say informs the film’s urgent moral tone.
- Reviewers portray Minotaur as a searing indictment of corruption and the normalization of violence in Putin‑era Russia, and Zvyagintsev used his Cannes acceptance speech to call for an end to the slaughter in Ukraine.