Zachary Lee

Morbidly humorous and shot with such patience as to conjure its latent anxieties up to the surface, Minotaur is a thriller about how the personal always intertwines with the political, and the damning reality that we can never deal with one crisis at a time.

Anchored by raw performances from Léa Seydoux and Niels Schneider, who play various permutations of open wounds, it thrives on its terror by committing so fully to its high-concept thrills. You may feel tempted to pinch your skin, to make sure you’re still in the right body.

It’s competently made and well-acted thanks to a blistering performance from Adèle Exarchopoulos, who perfectly embodies the pessimism and stubbornness of thinking you can give up a substance that you feel you’ve formed your soul around, but it doesn’t have enough of a visual or thematic identity to differentiate it from stories of a similar kind.

There’s easily another version of this story that could have been the movie of the week on Netflix, but Mysius and her team are too talented, too adroitly adept at merging the universal emotions of their characters with the cultural specificity of this story, to deliver anything less than compelling.

What [Kore-eda] offers is a new way to rethink holding our grief, and the end result is a slight and wistful poem of a movie.