Minotaur (2026) reviews

The Fuzzy Mushroom take on Minotaur

By Fuzzy Mushroom · Updated 10 November 2026 · The Pros 97 · The Punters 83 · Spore Score 94 · How we write our takes

Why The Pros rate it higher than The Punters

The Pros have handed Minotaur 97, one of the highest critics' figures we track this year. The Punters are warm too on 83, but not quite as besotted, and the Spore Score sits at 94. The gap is a familiar one for serious festival cinema. Critics have followed Andrey Zvyagintsev since his debut and see this as a career peak. Audiences coming in cold find a long, cold, demanding Russian-language drama that gives you very little comfort.

What it is

Zvyagintsev is the director of Leviathan and Loveless, two of the sharpest films about modern Russia. He left Moscow for France in 2022, and Minotaur was made in exile: a French, Latvian and German co-production, shot in Riga in late 2025. Loosely based on Claude Chabrol's 1969 thriller La Femme infidèle, it moves the story to a provincial Russian town in 2022. Gleb (Dmitriy Mazurov) is a business executive being leant on by local officials to send some of his own employees to fight in Ukraine. At the same time he discovers that his wife Galina (Iris Lebedeva) is having an affair.

What it does well

The genius of the set-up is how the private betrayal and the public one feed each other. Gleb is a man who will do what he is told, and the film asks what that does to a person who suddenly has a reason to be violent. Mazurov and Lebedeva are superb, saying everything with stillness. Mikhail Krichman, Zvyagintsev's long-time cinematographer, frames the town in glass, concrete and snow so that every room feels like a trap. There is real, bleak humour too, which surprises people who expect only gloom from this director.

Where it might lose you

It is slow, deliberately so, and the camera often holds on a scene long after a mainstream film would have cut. The Chabrol thriller at its core is quietly buried under the politics, so if you want a twisty marital whodunit you may feel short-changed. And it is unrelenting: there is no hero to cheer, and the ending is not built to send you home happy.

Who it is for

Anyone who admired Leviathan or Loveless. Fans of slow-burn European thrillers in the Michael Haneke mould. Viewers who want to understand what the war has done to ordinary Russian life from someone who knows it from the inside.

Context

Minotaur premiered in competition at Cannes on 19 May 2026, where it won the Grand Prix, the festival's second-highest award. It went on to win the Sydney Film Prize and is France's entry for Best International Feature at the 2027 Oscars. Mubi has the UK rights, and our UK release date for it is 27 November 2026.

The Fuzzy Mushroom verdict

Must-see, with a Spore Score of 94. Not an easy night out, but the kind of film people will still be talking about in ten years. The Pros are right. Go in rested, and go in ready to think.