Iris Lebedeva

Watch Galina in Minotaur (2026) across a dinner table. Nothing moves. Her husband Gleb talks, the Mayor is flattered, the staff come and go, and Lebedeva sits inside it like a woman doing sums. A scene or two later something has been done, and we realise the sum was finished long before. She frightened us more than anything the plot does, and the reason is simple: we could never tell what she had decided until she had already acted on it.

That is the only performance of hers we have reviewed, and we should say so. Before Zvyagintsev cast her she had spent more than a decade in Russian television and short films: a feature debut in Love-Carrot 3, a supporting part in Masha (2020), a bride in the comedy Love (2021), a recurring nurse in the series Kitchenblock (2021–2023). We have not seen enough of that work to judge it, and nothing in it seems to have told anyone what was coming. A VGIK graduate from a directing class, playing small parts for a decade and more, is not an unusual story. What is unusual is the size of the jump.

Here is why it works. Zvyagintsev builds his films out of rooms and silences, and Mikhail Krichman's camera does not blink; an actor who fidgets or signals under that kind of looking is found out at once. Lebedeva does neither. She lets the house, which Mariya Slavina and Andrey Ponkratov designed as the real lead, do the talking, and she holds something back from it. There is one outburst, over something as ordinary as a food order, where the lid comes off, and it is the moment most people will remember. We would not call it her best. The best moments are the ones where she declines to have one. "I don't judge Galina," she has said. "I completely understand her and how she could have arrived at that point." The performance is that sentence, held for 135 minutes.

What we cannot yet say is whether the stillness is a choice or the whole kit. One film with a director who wanted exactly that quality is a performance, not a pattern, and the next part will tell us more than this one did. Mazurov has the harder role, a man who has mistaken ownership for character, and Galina is given less of the film's point of view than he is. We would like to see her somewhere warmer, with a director less inclined to pin his cast to the furniture, and find out whether the arithmetic is still going on behind the face. On present evidence we would buy a ticket to find out.