‘Minotaur’ Trailer: Thrilling, Cannes-Winning Russian Noir Updates ‘Unfaithful’ for Even More Hopeless Times

While technically a Claude Chabrol remake, Andrey Zvyagintsev’s bleak new narrative of infidelity spun recklessly out of control will be most familiar to fans of Adrian Lyne’s “Unfaithful.” But this sleekly miserable noir about the aftermath of a feckless man’s confrontation with his wife’s younger lover transports the stuff of archetype into Putin’s Russia.

As I wrote in my IndieWire review out of Cannes, “Minotaur” is “exactly the kind of hopeless, coldly gazing, and politically indicting film only the director of ‘Leviathan’ and ‘Loveless’ could ever make.” Watch the film’s official U.S. trailer below.

“Minotaur” is set in Russia in 2022, where Gleb Morozov (Dmitriy Mazurov) is the CEO of a shipping company now under mounting corporate pressure to assemble a list of employees to conscript into military service. The invasion of Ukraine is just beginning. Videos of bombings are entering people’s social media feeds. His wife, Galina (Iris Lebedeva), is an unemployed housewife having an affair with a 33-year-old photographer, Anton (Yuriy Zavalnyouk), setting up a chain of events that collapses Gleb’s entire world while turning it, in cinematic terms, into a microcosmic metaphor for wartime Russia.

Zvyagintsev was hospitalized in 2021 after reacting badly to the Sputnik COVID vaccine, then put in a medically induced coma for two weeks. He spent a year flat on his back due to paralysis resulting from Guillain-Barré Syndrome. “I did not know if I would ever be able to walk again, to live again as a normal person. I have still now some consequences. I’m not at my best,” he told IndieWire during the 2026 Cannes Film Festival, where “Minotaur” won the Grand Prize. It’s a reimagining of French suspense master Claude Chabrol’s 1969 “The Unfaithful Wife.”

As I also wrote, “The thrill of ‘Minotaur’ is in how the filmmaker repositions the inevitable violence wrought from being cuckolded, the stuff we recognize from classic noir movies, into the political context of life in Russia amid its invasion into Ukraine. Imagine a Hitchcock thriller situated in the saddest, crummiest, most totalitarian corners of our times — and with an unfliching camera that offers no reassurance — and you’ll have some idea of just how bleak this unfeeling movie can get.”

Right now, its position in the Oscar race is vulnerable, as no country has submitted it for the Best International Feature race. That could be France, which has a significant share of the production credit, but the country is increasingly under pressure to submit an actual French-language movie. “Minotaur’s” Grand Prize win didn’t make it automatically eligible for the Oscar category, either; you’d have to win the top prize, the Palme d’Or, or similar at a major festival.

Mubi opens “Minotaur” in theaters on November 20 after playing the Toronto International and New York film festivals.