NZIFF Round Table Reviews: Minotaur

WEB EXCLUSIVE | REVIEW | NZIFF 

This is part of a series of roundtable discussions and extended dialogues conducted by Ricky Lai (@rickthelai), Trevor Pronoso (@CleverGurl), Madeline Smith (@prime4illusion), and Caeden Tipler (@ctipler) on films that have premiered at NZIFF 2026.

Minotaur (2026)

dir. Andzrej Zvyagintsev

France/Latvia/Germany, 135 mins

The following exchange is between Ricky and Madeline on Andzrej Zvyagintsev's latest film, Minotaur.

Ricky: Early on in Minotaur, Russian company director and drab everyman Gleb—the likeness of Cusack and Fallon abounds—consoles his son Seriozha with advice about standing up to his bully at school. Gleb tells Seriozha that he can beat him with his brain and that he should strike only in self-defence; making the first move is idiotic. By this point in the film, enough peripheral detail has already been glimpsed to suspect that Gleb will soon confront an adversary of his own: the paramour in his wife Galina's affair. This scene, to me, ripples as a fraught moral compass through the rest of Minotaur; fraught because, later on, Gleb winds up disobeying his own advice in the heat of the moment. But this hypocrisy highlights the key difference between what one man might say about violence and what he can reveal of his actual principles when the power leans in his favour. Gleb is asked to put 14 members of his staff into a military draft, and, already preoccupied with his own problems at home, he haphazardly whips up a horrific, bleakly funny scheme to just 'get it out of the way'.

I was extremely sceptical of Minotaur for a long chunk of its runtime. There is some merit in the 'accuracy' of depicting, as a well-modulated drama, all of the rationalised decisions by this husband and wife, which conceivably lead to an affair. But 'accuracy' alone can be weightless, especially if all I can glean from the movie is misery. "Wow, what a sad marriage this seems to be in this cold, sleek minimalist-style house." And when violence does arrive, it is followed by a prolonged, pedantic sequence where Gleb scrambles to discard the evidence—the camera swivels back and forth to watch him run from the kitchen, then to the floor, then to the sink, then back to the floor. I typically love details like this; keep in mind that one of my gripes with Guillermo del Toro's Frankenstein (2025)—excuse the digression—is that we don't get to see little things like Victor sweeping the blood off his laboratory floor. But what makes Minotaur seem tedious is that, initially, there appears to be no reason for all this processive detail to accumulate; to show Gleb working so hard to conceal a secret we already know. To what end?

As it turns out, there is an end. Garina visits her secret lover's apartment, knocks on the door, and hears no response. For all she knows, he's been drafted into the military. (The audience knows what has really gone down.) For a while, we watch her wander expressionlessly across the park and through the rest of the town, glancing at the young boys playing basketball and then strolling past a troop of soldiers in uniform. I found this heartbreaking for two reasons. The first is about those soldiers: the Ukraine-Russia war, which so far has been relegated to the backdrop of a comparatively trivial, bourgeois matter, has now begun to resurface with greater significance. We're forced to submit that the film has never not been about the war. The second reason is what really moved me, though: Garina is bored. Bored, full-time. The infidelity is cruel, but it gives her a break from what looks like an excruciatingly dull life. She comes home and berates her family for always ordering the same pizza. At Seriozha's birthday party, his teenage friends don't mingle with him because they seem a little boring. Garina is, of course, privileged to be bored on the cusp of a war, but unbeknownst to her, it's her corrupt husband pulling strings to keep her in line.

I guess in the end I liked this one. I was really torn because I was decisive around 80-90 minutes in (I guess) that I flat-out hated it, and that this film had "nothing" to say. Then again, that scene with Garina wandering the town sorta blew it wide open for me, and I began to appreciate it a lot more.

 "Fuck your war", reads graffiti scrawled on the underpass.

Madeline: I was most reminded of Tokyo Sonata (2008) while watching this one, and I'm unsure how much of that has to do with the elements these films actually have in common, or if that film simply overshadows any other domestic drama for me. Both films narrate a contemporary event through an individual family's crisis, and both deal with the attempt (and failure) to find a subjecthood outside of the assigned family roles. The significant difference is the nature of the event and how it affects the family's lives. In Tokyo Sonata (written and shot before the 2008 recession but released during it), the epidemic of layoffs and unemployment is depicted as a domestic apocalypse that completely breaks the family apart. In Minotaur, the war against Ukraine can only be a threat to the family unit if Gleb chooses to resist drafting his employees, and we know he won't. He may feel a bit of guilt, but none of that is going to change him. Galina may be upset over only being known and understood as 'Mrs. Gleb', but her attempt to self-actualise through an affair doesn't seem to do much to change her either. So, of course, part of the point is that we do not really learn anything more about these characters than we do at the start. The sociopathic bourgeois patriarch only becomes more sociopathic; Galina does not become anything more than 'Mrs. Gleb', etc. The film plays out exactly as I imagined it would, with no surprises. This static characterisation, based on the failure of characters to change and to find a subjecthood outside their social position, isn't inherently negative. Although I'm not sure it's used very effectively here. When everything is so subordinated to the capital-T 'Themes', I would hope to get a little more out of it than fairly obvious ideas of how the bourgeois family both depends on and distances itself from the violence of the state.

Tokyo Sonata [Kiyoshi Kurosawa, 2008]

I'm mostly in alignment with your thoughts. However, the later scene with Galina wasn't really enough to overturn my issues with the film. At the same time, I actually found more merit in the cleanup scene. I was struck by how Gleb is so, so bad at cleaning up the murder. In domestic dramas about the blow-up of the family, the typical trope is that the patriarch is revealed as impotent behind the strong and imposing image. When Gleb is trying to wipe the blood off the floor, it is so clearly the action of someone who has never had to clean for himself before, having first had everything done for him by his mother, then his wife. It's repeatedly emphasised throughout the film that Gleb is deeply incompetent (any time he tries to complete domestic tasks on his own, he messes them up), in part because his powerful role in both the domestic unit and his work prevents him from acting as a meaningful agent. Even in his attempt to directly enact the violence that he's otherwise distanced from, he remains just as pathetic. This idea is also not especially radical or novel; I found the scene's narration of it through action more compelling than the rote domestic drama elsewhere.

Ricky: That just about sums up what my hangup was; it's a well-made, well-articulated version of themes that feel rather obvious.The idea that this was primarily a plot about an affair almost warranted a 'so what?' I haven't seen Tokyo Sonata yet, but invoking Kiyoshi Kurosawa is interesting as his films' dilemmas are wracked with trepidation; no such dread really exists in Minotaur, which at least seems intentional if less impressionable. Being a far colder examination, the problems are already evident from the opening scenes and simply compound rather than gradually reveal themselves. As you described, the actual articulation of these problems through on-screen action is what at least reinforces Minotaur's allegory with streaks of specificity. The laborious pacing also helps the eventual anti-joke punchline, à la Burn After Reading (2008), land: that this absolutely pathetic crime, solved within a day by two fratty detectives, can be wiped clean by a phone call from somewhere high up. I'm unsure how convincing this nihilistic hand-wave is, because it too feels rote; it is at least funny that one of them explicitly asks 'why do we bother?' before shuffling off to lunch. But the ambiguous final shot, once again, demonstrates, through on-screen texture, that an entire plot's worth of sociopathy and corruption can slip from view and be lost in the clouds.