MINOTAUR

 Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely. 

Lord Acton 
 

The Minotaur is Putin, of course. Or, more precisely, it is the power that devours human beings after reducing them to numbers, expendable resources, cogs in a machine that must keep running. The Greek myth meets contemporary Russia, and the tribute demanded by the monster becomes a list of men to be sent to war. Seven maidens and seven youths in the legend; fourteen lives surrendered to power in the modern arithmetic of corporate management. Human sacrifice has been updated: it now comes through a CEO, an administrative order, and a few bureaucratic loopholes. This is the film's most felicitous insight, perhaps its only truly dazzling one. The title alone promises more than the film manages to deliver. 

Andrey Zvyagintsev constructs a portrait of Russia's business bourgeoisie, its rituals, alliances, and willingness to do anything to preserve its privileges and power. The family, dinners among businessmen and their wives, adulterous affairs: everything seems governed by the same proprietary logic, in which even affections end up being managed like corporate assets. The private sphere thus becomes a miniature theatre of the public one, the marital crisis a reflection of a broader political crisis. 

The problem is that this correspondence, interesting in theory, does not quite come together. Galina's infidelity, the discovery of her photographer lover, and the murder reproduce a narrative structure taken directly from Claude Chabrol's La femme infidèle, which Adrian Lyne had already reworked in Unfaithful. Here, the mechanism is all too familiar, at times almost a cut-and-paste job: a private drama that has already been extensively exploited, now expected to shoulder the weight of a political indictment. But a murder does not automatically acquire new depth simply because it takes place in Putin's Russia, just as adultery does not become a metaphor for totalitarianism merely through geographical proximity. 

It is precisely in the fusion of the individual and collective dimensions that Minotaur reveals its limitations. The idea that power rests not only on the will of the tyrant, but also on the complicity of those who support him, indulge him, or prefer not to see, is far from banal. Gleb is not merely a victim of circumstance: he actively participates in the system that sacrifices other human beings to protect his own interests. Yet the film's indictment is often more explicit than incisive, as though the director feared that viewers might fail to grasp the meaning of his allegories and felt compelled to underline it repeatedly. 

One is left with the suspicion that the project's political prestige has also worked in its favour as a cinematic achievement, with the Jury Prize at Cannes underscoring just how overrated it is. In a context where denouncing the Russian regime and the war means taking a position that is anything but inconsequential, the film seems to benefit from a kind of advance credit: the value of its political stance tends to overlap with the value of the work itself. Courageous intentions do not guarantee artistic success, and the moral necessity of an indictment does not, by definition, make for a good screenplay. 

Minotaur revisits and radicalises the argument Zvyagintsev had already developed in Loveless: the disintegration of private bonds is not an isolated incident, but a symptom of a society incapable of recognising the other as a human being. If, in Loveless, a child disappears into the indifference of parents and institutions, in Minotaur, men are handed over to war through an administrative selection process that turns sacrifice into a corporate practice. The distance between indifference and complicity is short: one need not hate human beings to sacrifice them; it is enough to consider them irrelevant. 

Minotaur remains an uneven film, with an effective central allegory, some interesting scenes, and a historical and political context that undeniably lends it relevance. But a gap opens up between the ambition of the parable and the conventionality of the drama, and the director fails to bridge it. The monster is recognisable, the sacrifices are real, the complicity clearly identified. What is too often missing is the transformation of all this into a genuinely necessary cinematic form. 

The Minotaur, after all, needs no explanation: it devours. In trying to show us just how monstrous it is, the film sometimes ends up circling around it, trapped in the labyrinth. 

Would it not be simpler for the government to dissolve the people and elect another? 

Bertolt Brecht