His films have been hailed as damning allegories of the Russian population’s apathy in the face of state oppression. Yet when director Andrey Zvyagintsev learned of his country’s invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, he too was paralysed, and literally so.

A severe infection with Covid-19 had left the film-maker stranded at a clinic in Hanover, Germany, struggling to breathe with 90% lung damage and unable to move or feel his limbs for several months. “It was in this state that I learned of the outbreak of the war in Ukraine,” he said in a rare recent interview. “It was a shock; I felt immense pain and deep despair.” In all, he spent 11 months in assorted hospitals.

Yet Zvyagintsev recovered. He relearned to walk and hold a spoon, and managed to channel his anguish back into film-making. The outcome will premiere on Tuesday in France at Cannes – the country where he has chosen to go into exile and the festival that cemented his reputation as Russia’s most important contemporary director with the launch in 2014 of Leviathan, a crime drama of Old Testament-level moral intensity.

Entitled Minotaur, the new film is an adaptation of Claude Chabrol’s 1969 erotic thriller The Unfaithful Wife, transplanted to a medium-sized provincial town. It follows a business executive (Dmitriy Mazurov) who is on the verge of laying off his employees when he discovers that his wife Galina (Iris Lebedeva) is having an affair.

At Cannes, Zvyagintsev has previously won the best screenplay and jury prizes but never the top award, and this year he will be competing for the Palme d’Or against auteur heavyweights such as Pedro Almodóvar, László Nemes and Asghar Farhadi. But his nine-year absence from the world of cinema means the 62-year-old’s return to the red carpet will be a major event.

“Many artistic careers have been broken by the political turn that Russia has taken,” said Julian Graffy, a professor of Russian literature and film at University College London. “But since Zvyagintsev was the most important of the new wave of directors that flowered in the early 21st century, the loss of his voice has been felt most keenly of them all.”

Born in Novosibirsk, Siberia, Zvyagintsev spent most of his first 40 years trying to make it as an actor, first at the Red Army’s theatre troupe and then at Moscow’s Russian Institute of Theatre Arts. After struggling to make a living as a film extra and a street cleaner, he found his calling in directing, helming police dramas and soap operas for Russian television at the turn of the century.

His debut feature, 2003’s The Return, set a more serious tone. An errant father returns to his confused family after years of absence to take his two sons to a mysterious island in the northern lakes, where he challenges them to a series of discipline-inducing tests.

Beautifully shot, tense and parabolic without an easy-to-decode moral lesson, it won the Golden Lion on its premiere at the Venice film festival, and gained grim notoriety through the fact that one of its teenage stars drowned shortly after filming, in an accident that mirrored its plot.

Unpredictable male authority figures became a theme. In The Banishment (2007), it’s the criminal husband who picks up his gun when his wife tells him she is pregnant but the child is not his; in Elena (2011) it is the millionaire tycoon who changes his will to the detriment of his partner when she asks for financial support for her son from a previous marriage.

With 2014’s Leviathan, however, those adjudicators of cruelty became more overtly political figures, unassailable through their affiliation with the state or the church. They are the vodka-sodden and corrupt mayor who hits rugged car-mechanic Nikolai (Aleksey Serebryakov) with a forced expropriation order, the government officials who refuse to hear Nikolai’s criminal filings, and the orthodox priest who blesses the mayor’s subsequent trail of vengeance.

In 2017’s Loveless, it’s the intensely religious CEO who has decreed staff divorces a violation of company policy, striking fear in the heart of pending divorcee Boris and leading other employees to hire impersonator wives to keep up appearances.

The defeatism with which Zvyagintsev’s characters accept such injustices is often unbearable, even if those who do rebel against them – like Leviathan’s Nikolai – are ultimately shown to be doomed. “I have a feeling of the absolute futility of pretending to the right to have a say in any situation,” he told the Guardian in 2014. “I’ve never voted in my life. Because I’m absolutely certain that in our system it’s a completely pointless step.”

To refuse to see these films as searing indictments of Russian society in the Putin era takes either wilful blindness or weapons-grade sarcasm. Zvyagintsev has been found in possession of the latter, when insisting in interviews that Leviathan was inspired by a real-life story in the US, or that his goal was certainly “not to confront power”. But then there is that portrait of Putin on the wall of the corrupt mayor’s office, and casually cruel parents smacking their children while watching news of the war in Ukraine’s Donbas region.

Russian authorities belatedly caught on to the show-don’t-tell. While 35% of Leviathan’s budget came from the Russian ministry of culture, the then minister Vladimir Medinsky later said he didn’t like the film and accused its director of being concerned only with “fame, red carpets, and statuettes”. “All flowers can grow,” the culture minister gnomically told Le Monde when asked about future funding for Zvyagintsev’s films, “but we only water the ones we like.”

Medinsky, an ultranationalist historian, is now leading the Russian delegation in peace talks with Ukraine.

Zvyagintsev, meanwhile, has cut commercial ties with his homeland. He said he made his decision not to return to Russia while recovering from Covid in Germany, “because I don’t want to be associated with what my country has done”. Minotaur, like Loveless beforehand, was developed without Russian state support, and is the first of his last five films not to be scripted by his former writing partner, Oleg Negin, who has stayed in Russia.

The focus of his moral gaze, however, remains stuck on the right place. Though filmed in Riga, Latvia, Minotaur is set in the fictional Russian town of Krasnoborsk in 2022 – the year of Putin’s full-scale invasion.