Set in 2022 Russia, Minotaur centers on middle-aged businessman Gleb (Dmitry Mazurov), a transport company CEO who lives an ultra-comfortable domestic life with his wife Galina (Iris Lebedeva) and teenage son in a sleek modernist home in a private wooded area. As the film begins, he is tasked by the town’s powerful mayor with drafting a quota of his employees to send to the newly ongoing war in Ukraine; at the same time, he begins to suspect that Galina is having an affair, which leads him to take drastic action.

With the finesse of his stated inspiration Claude Chabrol, Zvyagintsev has constructed a tale of corruption—personal, patriarchal, and governmental—that slow-burns with rage and fearless dark humor.