By Madelyn May
Come and See. Ivan’s Childhood. The Ascent. These are some of my favorite overtly political Soviet films. Each is visceral and devastating but also possesses precious moments of humanity. We, as the audience, understand there’s a message we are being asked to understand. Minotaur, which had its US premiere at the New York Film Festival, is not a film that speaks from a soapbox.
Directed by Andrey Zvyagintsev, the film is set during the first few months of Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine. Minotaur, crafted by the famed Russian auteur from exile with Latvia standing in as a provincial Russian any-town, might be one of the first great films about life in Putin’s modern Russia, specifically because of its subtlety.
Courtesy of IMDb.
Gleb, a local successful businessman, is tasked by the town’s mayor to draft a quota of 14 employees to send to the war in Ukraine. Gleb must decide who can be spared, who can be replaced. It’s painfully ordinary and at times, blissfully bureaucratic. These men aren’t names, jobs, or families, but bodies, sacrifice. Gleb isn’t a political man, but the politics of the war become impossible to escape in order to preserve the life he has constructed.
Gleb’s home is evidence of this. It’s modern, secluded, sleek, and comfortable. The pinnacle of perceived stability. Gleb’s a family man with a teenage son and a wife, Galina. The shading trees outside his home provide a sort of expensive quiet, and the assumption that the world, despite everything, can keep a manageable distance.
Thus, Gleb does not initially experience the task of finding 14 men as an ideological crisis. It’s a cost, at the most, to preserve the life he’s created for himself, an inconvenience, at the least. This is probably Zvyagintsev at his bleakest: the idea that authoritarianism often doesn’t announce itself from a soapbox either; it thrives in forms and mundanity. It’s not that the moral vocabulary is ignored; it almost doesn’t exist.
Courtesy of New York Film Festival.
Zvyagintsev has always been fascinated with the ways institutions enter intimate life. 2014’s Leviathan, a film about a fisherman fighting back against a corrupt mayor seeking to take possession of his family home, made the state itself, and its corruption, feel almost a part of the landscape. Loveless, a 2017 thriller about a brutal divorce and missing child, identified national alienation inside the emotional vacancy of a marriage. In Minotaur, the distinction between the domestic and the political blurs as Gleb’s family life is set up with the same logic as the state: possession has nothing to do with space, secrecy fuels action, fear creates distrust, hierarchy isn’t implied, whatever is happening behind the walls of the house is at the discretion of whoever owns it.
That’s because Gleb’s wife is having an affair. Something that should be a private matter, Zvyagintsev examines under the same moral language of the war. The irony is that Gleb discovers his wife’s betrayal at the same moment the government is demanding his participation in the destruction of other people’s families. But where he is capable of recognizing betrayal when it happens to him, Gleb is unable to understand the betrayal he is being asked to participate in. And Gleb’s rage is the righteous anger of someone who believes his private world belongs to only him.
These two betrayals, one within the state and one within the home, sit together side by side, and there’s no hierarchy in which one kind of violence is more meaningful and the other is merely political. The parallel is the point.
The ancient myth of the minotaur in the labyrinth and the procession of young people sent in as sacrifices can also give us some hints to the film’s political message. In Zvyagintsev's Russia, the labyrinth is in the bureaucracy, and the monster does not need to stand at the center of the maze. Putin’s inside the Kremlin.
This is why the film’s politics can appear far more unsettling than a conventional antiwar film: Gleb is not asked whether he supports the invasion or whether he supports the minotaurish system he is pragmatically asked to participate in. The film questions the layers upon layers of bureaucracy that allow authoritarianism to succeed. From the mayor to the businessman to the employees. What happens when ideology becomes ambient? Surely, not everyone in a system that large can be monstrous? Well, no. But what Minotaur demonstrates is the ways enormous violence can be so compatible with everyday life.
Minotaur (2026).
Gleb loves his son. He’s protective of his company. He feels great humiliation by his wife’s infidelity, and he simply wants to preserve the perceived serenity of his life prior to the invasion. This, of course, requires murdering his wife’s lover.
Gleb’s responses to his loss of political and marital agency and his attempt to regain control become the same: violence. One of the fantasies of authoritarianism is that while obedience is necessary, authority can also be restored. If the world has made you feel small, there is always someone beneath you who can be made smaller. It certainly isn’t a coincidence that Galina’s lover is a photographer, as art is always one of the first fields to face the wrath of these kinds of governments. Each subsequent act of brutality deepens the corridors of the labyrinth, sustained by an ever-growing accumulation of secrets, and the truth is the labyrinth survives because the people who’ve learned to live there maintain it.
It is really easy to watch Minotaur as a portrait of a corrupt foreign system whose pathology belongs to people and leaders on the other side of the world. But the film is more about a universal human capacity to separate one’s own moral life from the consequences of one’s actions, especially if those actions are seemingly in service of a greater goal.
Rarely ever are there moments when ordinary citizens overtly cross into becoming collaborators. Everything exists in smaller moments of gradual complacency. The horror comes from this disappearance of agency, the routine. The war is everywhere. It’s inside the company. It’s inside the marriage. It’s inside the house. The mayor has his orders. The businessman has his quota. The employees have their summons. The soldiers have their commanders. And, somewhere above it all, in the clouds, is the minotaur.
