It begins not with a labyrinth of stone, but with a company: Gleb, a successful company boss, faces mounting business pressure and an unstable political situation in Russia in 2022. Andrey Zvyagintsev’s “Minotaurus” thus centres on a familiar seat of power – the company as a space where decisions are made about others, with consequences that do not stop at the office door.
The film opens in cinemas across Germany on 5 November 2026. It received the Grand Prix at the Cannes Film Festival. Its premise promises not a study of business in the strict sense, but a story about the relationship between control at work and private life: what happens when someone who controls processes and people professionally loses control over the order of his own life?
The company as a model of power
A company brings together responsibilities, hierarchies and dependencies. Whoever stands at its head makes decisions not only about figures, but also about working conditions and other people’s futures. “Minotaurus” takes this leverage as its dramatic starting point. The title also evokes an image of power entrenched within itself: the Minotaur of antiquity lives in a labyrinth whose paths others must first find. As an aid to interpretation, this offers less a ready-made key to the plot than a question: who builds the passages, who controls the exits – and who bears the consequences?
The Cannes Film Festival’s official description places the story in Russia in 2022 and mentions an increasingly uncertain world alongside the pressures within the company. The political dimension is thus introduced not as an abstract backdrop, but as a condition under which professional and personal decisions are made. The film begins with a single man; its broader perspective emerges from his position within the structures of company and society. This premise alone does not allow any specific conclusions about the experiences of all employees or the workings of a particular company.
Private life under public pressure
Zvyagintsev’s earlier films, such as “Leviathan” and “Loveless”, connect personal crises with the social conditions in which they unfold. This is no evidence that “Minotaurus” has the same form or effect. It does, however, mark a recurring area of the director’s work: the relationship between intimacy, responsibility and power. The new film brings this perspective into an environment where leadership and decision-making authority are part of everyday life.
It is precisely here that the tension between private responsibility and professional authority lies. A decision may seem expedient within a company and yet carry personal costs. Conversely, private responsibility cannot be separated from the structures within which someone acts. The film’s background thus also poses a question to its audience: how much is a personal decision worth when its consequences are distributed among people who have little say in it?
European production, Russian setting
According to filmportal.de, the film was shot in Riga from September to November 2025; the Cannes Film Festival lists France, Latvia and Germany as its countries of production. The producers include several production companies from these countries, among them Germany’s Razor Film Produktion. The FFA lists MUBI as the distributor and records support through the Franco-German co-production funding scheme. This arrangement is more than a simple indication of origin: a film about contemporary Russia was organised as a European project and made outside Russia.
This gives the production history particular weight without making it an explanation of the film itself. European co-productions bring together funding, production expertise and partners across national borders. Here, these working conditions sit alongside a story set in Russia. The available credits do not, however, imply that each country had an equal share of funding or influence; they identify participants and funding channels, not the full decision-making structure.
Following “Loveless” in 2017, “Minotaurus” brings us back to a director whose cinema often places private relationships within broader social tensions. What can be said with certainty on the basis of the documented information is this: the film begins with a company boss under pressure and makes his situation a focal point of the political present. How convincingly this becomes a film about responsibility and power remains a question to be answered by watching it.
Original reviewed by the editors · 4 November 2026
