Andrey Zvyagintsev reworks a Chabrol domestic thriller into a cold, exact account of how a rich Russian household disposes of its problems. Iris Lebedeva is superb and Mikhail Krichman’s frames are pitiless; at 135 minutes the film is a touch too sure of its own patience.
Andrey Zvyagintsev has not made a feature since Loveless in 2017, and Minotaur is the film of a man who has spent the gap getting angrier and quieter. Written with Simon Liashenko, it takes a Claude Chabrol domestic thriller, the kind in which a well-off marriage has something in it that will not stay buried, and moves it to a rich Russian household in the present, with a war going on somewhere beyond the gates. The tagline is “Morality is a maze.” The film is blunter than that. It is about a house, who owns it, and what the people inside it will do to keep it.
Gleb (Dmitriy Mazurov) has the house, the money and the right friends, chief among them the Mayor (Vladimir Friedman), whose approval has to be renewed in person. Galina (Iris Lebedeva) is his wife, and the marriage is kept in good order the way the garden is. Varvara Shmykova’s Natasha, Anastasia Mischenko’s Dasha and Rudgy Pajany’s Adrien move through the rooms around them. Mariya Slavina and Andrey Ponkratov have designed the house as the main character: long corridors, hard surfaces, glass that shows the grounds and nothing past them. By the half-hour mark we knew every room, and we wanted out of all of them.
Mikhail Krichman has shot every one of Zvyagintsev’s features and he has not softened. He frames people in wide, level shots and leaves them there, the way a police photographer frames a room, so that you look for the thing that is wrong before anyone tells you. Zvyagintsev cuts his own film, which explains the pace. Shots run on past the point where another editor would have let us go, and that is the method, not an accident. Evgueni and Sacha Galperine’s score is used sparingly; much of the film plays in the silence of a big house with the heating on, and when the music does arrive it feels like a decision.
Lebedeva carries the film. She plays Galina with a stillness that is never blank, a woman doing arithmetic behind her face, and it is the best performance in the film. She frightened us more than anything the plot does, because we could never tell what she had decided until she had done it. Mazurov is good in the harder part, a man who has mistaken ownership for character. Friedman’s Mayor never raises his voice and never needs to.
What holds it short of Zvyagintsev’s best is the length and the title. At 135 minutes the middle hour has stretches where the stillness stops being tension and becomes waiting, and we felt the difference in our seats. And the Minotaur of the title, the beast at the centre of the maze, is an idea the film states more than once and does not always need; the house and the Mayor say it better than the mythology does. One or two critics have found the film too conventional for its ambitions. We think the conventions are what allow it to be this cruel without appearing to try.
Set beside Leviathan (2014), which went after the Russian state through one stubborn man and his house on the coast, this is smaller, colder and more enclosed, with none of the earlier film’s drink or weather. It is closer to Elena (2011): a domestic crime, a question of who ends up with what, and a camera that never takes a side. The last image looks past the house at something a long way off, and we have not stopped thinking about it.
See it in a cinema if you can bear the quiet. At home the silences will tempt you to look at your phone, and the film will know you did.
