Sightlines · a reading
A Deleuzian reading of Minotaur
2026 · Andrey Zvyagintsev · Minotaur on Sightlines
Start with a man in a good office, doing paperwork. Gleb Morozov runs a successful company in provincial Russia. The state has told him to choose men from his workforce for military mobilisation, so he has to pick names. Around the same time he comes to suspect that his wife, Galina, is sleeping with someone else. Andrey Zvyagintsev's Minotaur sets these two tasks side by side and lets each one infect the other. Choosing which men to give up to the war turns into the same act as wanting to destroy the man who has taken his wife. Nothing in the frame raises its voice. The office is orderly. The home is expensive. Both are empty in the way that only well-kept rooms can be.
The film has an obvious style, and the style is its argument. Mikhail Krichman, who has shot every Zvyagintsev feature since The Return, frames the film in his usual way: composed, often symmetrical images, slow camera movement, and wide shots held long enough that the people in them shrink. The bedroom conversations between Gleb and Galina are spare and seen from a clinical distance. Zvyagintsev, credited here as his own editor, lets scenes run long and then cuts over what happened in between, so the viewer has to fill the gaps. The camera never comes close enough to excuse Gleb. It keeps him at the distance from which you look at a specimen.
That distance is the way into Deleuze. In his books on cinema, Deleuze describes a kind of image he calls the impulse-image, and links it to a tradition he names naturalism. The idea is simpler than it sounds. A naturalist film shows you a real, recognisable setting, such as a house, a firm or a town. Deleuze calls this the derived milieu. Then the film slowly reveals that the setting is only a surface, and that underneath it runs an older, more savage world of pure appetite, which he calls the originary world. In that world people behave like predators and prey, and the drives that move them only ever run downhill. Deleuze calls that downhill the line of slope: an irreversible slide toward exhaustion, ruin and death.
Zvyagintsev gives this structure a name in the title. The Minotaur lives at the centre of a labyrinth and eats the young. Critics have read the creature both as Gleb and as a figure for a system that sends young men to a war. The film doesn't need to choose. The corridors, offices and bedrooms are the derived milieu, which is confinement dressed as wealth. The labyrinth is the originary world under them, and the list of names on Gleb's desk is where the two meet. The lens pays off because it explains how the film can be political without speeches. In naturalism, a social order is diagnosed by showing the appetite it runs on.
The second concept is sharper and belongs to Deleuze's account of the action-image, the ordinary cinema in which situations call forth acts. He describes an "index of equivocity": a single act that could belong to two different situations, so that you can't be sure which one it answers. Minotaur is built on this. When Gleb decides which man to give up, is he answering the state or his jealousy? The screenplay by Zvyagintsev and Simon Lyashenko makes the question impossible to settle, and that is how private rage and state paperwork become what critics called a single moral illness.
Watch Gleb's composure. Dmitriy Mazurov plays him with the restraint Zvyagintsev has drawn from actors since The Banishment, and reviewers stress that his violence grows out of his calm instead of breaking through it. Deleuze would call the calm a symptom: the visible surface of a drive working underneath. The film follows Zvyagintsev's familiar shape, a slow build and then a sudden break, and the collapse of Gleb's ordered life speeds up toward violence. The speed-up is the line of slope made audible.
The lineage is plain, and the film is honest about it. Its direct source is Claude Chabrol's La Femme infidèle (1969). Minotaur keeps that film's composed bourgeois husband, the killing of the lover, the investigation the household then has to sit through, and Chabrol's ironic detachment toward the cuckold. From Le Boucher it takes Chabrol's habit of placing violence inside calm daily routine and holding back from showing it. From Juste avant la nuit it takes the idea of murder as something a well-off household manages instead of punishing. Behind Chabrol stands Hitchcock's Strangers on a Train. Deleuze read that film as a cinema of relations, in which suspense depends on who carries the guilt, not on who committed the crime. Minotaur takes up that question and pulls it down from Hitchcock's mental puzzle into naturalist appetite: guilt is passed along, and someone always ends up eaten.
It also argues with its ancestors. Adrian Lyne's Unfaithful (2002) remade the same story as erotic melodrama in close-up. The close-up is the home of what Deleuze calls the affection-image, a face registering a feeling. Zvyagintsev turns that intimacy down and stays far away. Bergman's Shame (1968) supplies the deeper template: war at the edge of a marriage, so that a couple's private decay registers a national emergency. Zvyagintsev's own Leviathan and Loveless already worked this way, reading Russia through its households.
What changes here is where the film was made from. Minotaur is Zvyagintsev's first film in exile. It was shot in Latvia as a French, German and Latvian co-production, with Baltic locations standing in for Russia. It won the Grand Prix at Cannes in 2026, and in his acceptance speech Zvyagintsev asked Putin to "put an end to this carnage." It is the most prominent work so far in a still-forming cinema of the war's home front, made by Russian directors who left. Its achievement is formal as well as moral. It shows that the cold, controlled grammar of the art film can still indict, and that from far enough away you can see the whole structure of a system that devours.
That leaves the question the title asks and never quite answers: where is the monster? When you watch it again, look past the bedroom and the crime to the paperwork. Watch the ordinary acts of a calm man signing things, and notice how much violence the frame can hold without ever moving closer.
Concepts in play
- impulse-image (naturalism) — A world of drives under the bourgeois surface: private jealousy and state mobilisation turn into 'a single moral illness'; the Minotaur title as the creature that eats the young
- derived milieu — The orderly, expensive, emotionally empty executive office and affluent home; corridors, offices and bedrooms that stage confinement inside wealth
- originary world — The labyrinth and its monster, read by critics as both Gleb and a system that feeds young men to a war, revealed under the bourgeois setting
- line of slope (entropy / degradation) — The collapse of Gleb's carefully ordered life 'accelerates toward violence'; Zvyagintsev's slow build and sudden break
- index of equivocity — Choosing which employees to hand over for mobilisation mirrors his private wish to destroy his wife's lover, so one act answers two situations
- symptom — Gleb's composure: reviewers stress that his violence grows out of his calm rather than breaking it (Mazurov's controlled, understated performance)
- index of lack — Ellipses that leave the viewer to fill in what happened between scenes, in the method of Elena and Loveless
- the frame (cadre) — Krichman's composed, often symmetrical frames and long-held wide shots that keep characters small inside cold spaces; architecture as moral climate