Zvyagintsev returns with a Minotaur: Grand Prix after eight quiet years

A sixty-square-metre apartment. A kitchen table. The father, played by Alexey Serebryakov (Zvyagintsev’s long-time collaborator since “Leviathan”), is counting his wife’s insulin prescriptions in her medical record.

The son Ilya, nineteen, has been missing for three days. The father still does not know whom to report to first. The police refuse the report because the boy has previous unexplained nights away. His friends do not have Ilya’s number. The mother will not cross the threshold of her own study.

The scene runs sixteen minutes. Nothing happens in it. For Andrey Zvyagintsev, that is not only a poetic choice but a kind of ethical stance toward his own character.

Eight years after “Loveless” and eleven years after “Leviathan”, the Russian director returned to the Croisette with a film that on the closing Saturday won the Grand Prix, the second-highest honour at the 79th edition of the Cannes Film Festival.

A production in exile

The film is financed by French, German and Belgian producers. Shooting was carried out in Estonia, because Zvyagintsev has not worked with Russian money since 2022.

The cast also includes:

• Chulpan Khamatova, who left Moscow for Latvia in 2022
• Petr Volpov, the Estonian actor, as the son Ilya
• an ensemble of Russian actors now living outside Russia, distributed between Berlin and Tbilisi

The film received eleven positive reviews at Cannes and only two negative ones, the traditional ratio for Zvyagintsev’s work.

The labyrinth as a dramaturgical idea

The central metaphor of “Minotaur” is as expected as one could expect from a director with this kind of past. Concrete. The suburb. The missing son. The father who searches but loses himself in the search. All of it looks as if it would be exhausted by the halfway mark.

Zvyagintsev and his screenwriter Oleg Negin invert the central myth. The father, searching for his son, actually finds himself as a being who is not quite human, a being who lives in his own house as a stranger.

We do not find the son. His disappearance is left unexplained. But the father gradually loses what he thought he possessed, above all the consciousness of being a father.

The film’s visual vocabulary directly cites Tarkovsky, Kozintsev and early Antonioni. Long static shots. A complete absence of non-diegetic music. Poorly lit stairwells. Flaking white enamel paint. Beds with stretched nets in place of springs.

All of this is familiar to anyone who lived through Soviet infrastructure in the 1980s. The film is set in 2025, which adds a further layer. The Russian apartment and the Russian building have not changed since the end of the Cold War, while history, state and institutions have passed through three complete transformations. Zvyagintsev does not illuminate that position directly, but the film’s dramaturgical arc places it at the centre.

The political context of the prize

The 79th edition’s jury, presided over by Park Chan-wook, awarded “Minotaur” the Grand Prix after the Palme d’Or went to Cristian Mungiu’s “Fjord”. The decision to give a major award to a Russian director who publicly rejects Moscow’s war policy is not accidental, especially at a moment when the festival is maintaining its ban on official Russian delegations.

After the ceremony, Park Chan-wook said the jury valued “Minotaur” as a film that is not politically direct, but is politically honest. A formulation that in the context of this edition of the festival means a great deal.

Zvyagintsev was not present at the ceremony. He had announced in advance that he would not attend for “personal reasons”. In a brief acceptance statement he said he received the prize on behalf of every Russian filmmaker working outside Moscow who, in his phrase, “lost the state but did not lose the craft”.

That line has already appeared in several European reviews as the most precise description of the current condition of Russian film exile, now distributed across Berlin, Tbilisi, Belgrade (where part of the acting community lives) and Helsinki.

Why this film also speaks to us

Belgrade distribution has already announced an autumn premiere, most likely as part of the Kustendorf program or in regular cinema release in October, after the festival cycle ends.

For audiences in Serbia, who have a traditionally close relationship with Zvyagintsev because “The Return”, “Leviathan” and “Elena” all drew significant attention, “Minotaur” means more than another Russian film. It is a film about fatherhood in a collapsed state, a subject that in our context, with children leaving and fathers staying behind, hardly needs additional explanation.

Can Zvyagintsev still say something new?

The question reviewers opened at Cannes is not rhetorical. A director who has made five feature films across twenty years has a tightly defined poetic territory. Each new production has to demonstrate that it is not repetition.

For now, “Minotaur” has divided critics into two groups:

• those who think Zvyagintsev is finding a new subject within his old aesthetic
• those who think the film is a decade late but still worth what it shows

This is a film one does not watch only once, and one that yields more on a second viewing than on the first. In 2026, when films are increasingly consumed in passing, that is no longer a small thing.

What do you think: can a director who has lost his country still make films about that country without losing his voice and his footing?