Andrey Zvyagintsev’s latest entry, Minotaur, has released its first trailer. As with Loveless and Leviathan before it, Minotaur finds itself with a robust Cannes run and with Oscar buzz drumming around the film. The film won the Grand Prix at the 79th Cannes Film Festival in May 2026.
Minotaur’s trailer is chilling to say the least. It shows a man named Gleb discussing with his colleague that he suspects his wife of cheating on him. We see a montage of his wife in bed with a different man. We also see a montage of her strange and duplicitous behavior around him.
Then, the trailer moves into the events of February 2022, when Russia mobilized its troops against Ukraine. The backdrop of the war intensifies the conflict that he feels about his wife’s infidelity, leading him to meet the man his wife is cheating on him with. The trailer then drops the title of the movie.
You can watch the trailer below (watch more trailers):
The story, cast & release details behind Minotaur
As seen in the trailer, the subject matter that Zvyagintsev chose to tackle in Minotaur is the Ukraine War.
The official synopsis of the film reads, “Russia, 2022. When Gleb, a successful company director, finds himself under siege from mounting corporate pressures and an increasingly unstable world, the collapse of his carefully ordered life accelerates toward violence. “
Zvyagintsev, in an interview about the film, revealed how the main drama of the film came to him and his co-screenwriter, Simon Lyashenko. He revealed in a press release, “My co-screenwriter Simon Lyashenko and I had to invent what kind of company this man ran and what the pitfalls of this company could be. It was real life that gave us the answer. In the autumn of 2022, Russia mobilized. This event fundamentally changed the lives of Russians. The mass exodus of the citizens of that country, especially young men, suddenly provided the harrowing backdrop to the events of that time. “
The cast of Minotaur includes Dmitriy Mazurov in the role of the protagonist, Gleb. He is joined by other talent, such as Iris Lebedeva, Boris Kudrin, Yuriy Zavalnyouk, Varvara Shmykova, Vladimir Friedman, and Mikhail Samodakhov, among others.
The film, understandably, will not be on Russia’s short list to send to the Academy Awards this year (unlike Loveless and Leviathan). Instead, the French have taken the film on their shortlist and will be meeting again to figure out which would be their entry for the Best International Feature Film.
The film will receive a North American release on November 20. It premieres Tuesday at the Toronto International Film Festival.