2026 Chicago International Film Festival Movie Review: Minotaur

Andrey Zvyagintsev’s Minotaur is the second remake of Claude Chabrol’s 1969 La Femme infidèle, along with Adrien Lyne’s 2002 Unfaithful. All three follow the same main plot: an upper-class married couple is unhappy, yet neither wants to end the marriage. The husband finds out the wife is having an affair, and drama ensues. The beats of Minotaur are roughly the same as the other two films, but it’s everything around the plot that makes Minotaur more interesting than its predecessors, though I wouldn’t necessarily say better.

Zvyagintsev sets Minotaur in contemporary Russia. The husband in Minotaur is Gleb, played by Dmitriy Mazurov. He is a high-powered business executive who is also part of the Russian oligarchy. He has connections to the highest-ranking members of the Russian government and uses this power when he can, as long as he helps them out when they need a favor. He lives in a beautiful modern mansion in the wooded countryside with his wife Galina (Iris Lebedeva) and their son Seryozha (Boris Kudrin). As soon as we meet Gleb and Galina, we can feel the distance between them. She always turns her cheek when he goes to kiss her; their conversations are very limited, and she’s happier texting on her phone than talking with him. Their house is cold, but not on the thermostat.

The affair and domestic drama, again, are pretty much the same as what took place in the other iterations. Zvyagintsev takes his time telling this story, allowing us to sit and bask in the uncomfortableness of being around this marriage that should have ended years ago by expertly utilizing spacing between the characters to show their distance, and heightening the room noise to elevate the silences. While it can get a bit dry and slow at times, other times you can feel the lost love and awkwardness between Gleb and Galina. When the climactic moment happens, it isn’t played for shock or terror. Zvyagintsev maintains the methodical pacing, which fuels the whole situation with tension.

I found setting Minotaur in contemporary Russia the most interesting part of the film. Zvyagintsev co-wrote the film with Simon Lyashenko, and along with being a domestic drama about infidelity and the facade of the rich, Minotaur is a snapshot of a country at war, where men are being drafted weekly because they are running out of soldiers, and being run by the soulless. Gleb is a man of no morality. A soulless cog in the corrupt Russian military and financial world that sends innocent men to war and drives his wife to an affair. Throughout Minotaur, his main job is to find fourteen men for the Russian government to send to war, so he uses a hiring scheme to do so. It’s a morally disgusting task, but one that firmly establishes the type of man Gleb is. The decision Zvyagintsev and Lyashenko made to use La Femme infidèle as the source material to show Russian corruption and the lack of care for its people is a bold and creative decision.

Minotaur is a well-made, good-looking film that mixes domestic drama and political fable to show a snapshot of a wealthy couple in modern-day Russia. While parts of the film are slow, I found it complex, challenging, and riveting, and I can’t wait to revisit it before the year ends. It is one of the most fascinating movies I have seen in 2026, even with its flaws.

Follow Kevflix on Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, and Letterboxd by searching Kevflix.