Minotaur

The year is 2022 and the backdrop is Vladimir Putin’s corruption-drenched Russia in Academy Award nominee Andrey Zvyagintsev’s latest, his first feature since 2017’s astounding Loveless. A bone-chilling reimagining of both Claude Chabrol’s La femme infidèle and Adrian Lyne’s Unfaithful, Zvyagintsev’s thriller follows the essentials of the source material: Amid various work pressures, a powerful businessman (Dmitriy Mazurov) learns that his increasingly distant wife (Iris Lebedeva) is cheating on him. But the filmmaker also puts a masterfully nihilistic spin on the story’s machinations, questioning, with his ingenious inquisitiveness and observantly still camerawork, whether any authority in his motherland would care about unspeakable acts of crime when the country is at war with Ukraine and a sense of lawlessness has seized the higher-ups. The winner of the Grand Prix at the Cannes Film Festival, Minotaur gifts us a parting note that feels like a silent scream with echoes that inhabit the soul.