It’s been nearly a decade since director Andrei Zvyagintsev’s last feature. His sleek, ice-cold noir, Grand Prix winner at Cannes, is set in a Russia returned to its most brutal imperialist ways.
The regime is hungry for cannon fodder for its war on Ukraine, and Gleb (Dmitriy Mazurov), a businessman in a provincial town, must contend with the mayor’s demand for a list of disposable employees to help fill military draft numbers.
What’s more, Gleb’s suspicions that his wife (Iris Lebedeva) is having an affair are confirmed (in a remake of Claude Chabrol’s 1969 The Unfaithful Wife). Her deep discontentment with her affluent but shallow existence is more than his ego can absorb. His family’s high-end lifestyle of top restaurants and luxury vacations has been a bubble detached from political realities.
But the violence and self-serving corruption underpinning power in the nation bleeds through every corner of their lives; a spectacularly monstrous, abject horror that can be repressed no longer. Zvyagintsev, who has lived in exile in France since 2022, shot the film in Latvia, standing in for Russia. – Carmen Gray
