Bunker

A house can tell you plenty about a marriage, particularly when its owners have spent more time perfecting its appearance than examining what happens inside it. In Bunker, Florian Zeller turns an affluent London home into the setting for a domestic reckoning, with Javier Bardem and Penélope Cruz supplying the emotional detail that the screenplay sometimes struggles to find. The premise is seductive: an acclaimed architect receives an extraordinary commission to design a survival shelter for a technology billionaire, just as his own carefully arranged existence begins to unravel. Questions of professional integrity, marital resentment and purchased security crowd into the same handsome rooms. There is a sharp, uncomfortable film somewhere within this material. What reaches the screen is more uneven: absorbing in its performances, occasionally incisive in its humour, but too anxious to explain its significance.

The project has an origin almost too convenient for a screenwriter. Florian Zeller told reporters in Venice that accounts of a technology entrepreneur constructing a private refuge sparked his interest: someone enriched by connecting people was preparing to withdraw from them. That contradiction gives Bunker its strongest political idea. An architect accustomed to thinking about how people inhabit the world is invited to help a client abandon it. The money is considerable, but the deeper temptation is professional vanity: the opportunity to realise something exceptional without ordinary financial constraints. Mark Gatiss, as the architect’s business associate, helps expose the accommodating logic through which an ethically dubious commission becomes an irresistible creative opportunity. The film understands how readily sophisticated people can find sophisticated reasons to do something they would otherwise condemn. Reuters

That temptation becomes more interesting through Javier Bardem, whose performance leaves room for recognisable, sometimes defensible concerns. His character wants privacy, stability and protection for his family; the trouble lies in his growing conviction that these things require everyone else to comply with his wishes. A neighbour opening a window overlooking the family’s property provides an everyday dispute with disproportionate psychological consequences. Stephen Graham brings enough grievance and abrasive confidence to prevent the encounter from becoming a comfortable demonstration of wealthy hypocrisy. There are competing claims to space, dignity and belonging here. For the architect, the neighbourhood is part of an achievement he expects to preserve. For the neighbour, its transformation has a history that expensive new arrivals would prefer to overlook. Their exchanges briefly suggest a richer social drama than the film’s more explicit arguments can sustain.

Within the marriage, Penélope Cruz provides the most persuasive sense of what this prosperous life has cost. Her character works in publishing, but the move from Madrid to London has benefited her husband’s career more clearly than her own. The resulting imbalance lives in her watchfulness, her pauses and the effort involved in remaining agreeable. An early anecdote about their first date is particularly revealing: tears remembered as evidence of emotional openness turn out to have a less romantic explanation involving a cat allergy. It is a small joke with an unpleasant aftertaste, suggesting how couples preserve flattering versions of their beginnings. Javier Bardem and Penélope Cruz make that shared history credible without laboriously illustrating it. Their shifts between Spanish and English also give the relationship a private texture, a familiar space they can enter together even as their understanding of each other weakens.

The billionaire’s appearance gives the film a welcome jolt. Seen through a video call, Paul Dano makes his client’s grotesque priorities sound like practical matters awaiting an efficient solution. The performance is funny because the man scarcely seems aware that anything he says might require moral justification. His interest in controlling the shelter’s oxygen supply exposes the real ambition behind his preparations: even after a catastrophe, he intends to retain authority over the people around him. Survival alone would evidently be insufficient compensation for losing his position. Here, Bunker finds a disturbing extension of its premise, imagining how dependency might replace money as the instrument of power. The scene also throws the architect’s evasions into sharper relief. Once the commission has been explained this plainly, continued fascination with its technical possibilities becomes revealing in itself.

The physical environment carries some of the film’s strongest observations. Ben Smithard photographs an interior whose elegance offers little reassurance, while the house’s glass and open spaces leave its occupants exposed to one another without necessarily bringing them closer. An architect who values transparency in design proves considerably less comfortable with it in daily life. The elaborate security equipment, including fog cannons, adds a useful streak of absurdity: anxiety becomes something a salesman can assess, enlarge and invoice. These passages work best when embarrassment and menace occupy the same scene. Elsewhere, the emphatic musical interventions of Volker Bertelmann press too insistently on the tension. Compared with the spatial disorientation of The Father, the relationship between setting and psychology is easier to decode here, and the dialogue too often repeats what the images have already communicated.

The principal weakness is how little uncertainty the screenplay allows its ideas. Florian Zeller establishes the parallels between private shelter, social withdrawal and emotional retreat early, then keeps returning to explain them. Meanwhile, potentially revealing complications receive less attention. The publishing storyline and the young writer played by Patrick Schwarzenegger could have given the wife desires and contradictions independent of her husband’s crisis. Instead, they remain insufficiently developed, leaving Penélope Cruz to suggest an interior life beyond what the scenes provide. The filmmaker reportedly wrote the central roles specifically for his two stars, and their familiarity gives the confrontations weight. Yet casting cannot entirely compensate for a dramatic imbalance: the husband is permitted to be vain, frightened and contradictory, while the wife is too frequently required to articulate the objections the audience has already formed. El País

The final stretch raises the immediate stakes but resolves too much of the preceding unease through a heavily arranged dramatic turn. Without revealing its details, the conclusion asks a decisive incident to accomplish work that the relationship itself needed more time to do. There is something frustrating about a film that recognises the danger of retreating into private happiness, then struggles to connect personal reconciliation to its broader social concerns. Still, Bunker contains performances worth lingering over, particularly the wounded intelligence of Penélope Cruz, the defensive self-assurance of Javier Bardem, and the casually appalling entitlement of Paul Dano. Its most convincing insight concerns the everyday habits through which comfort becomes possessiveness. When it trusts those habits to reveal themselves, it has bite. When it explains them, it loses much of its force.

Bunker
Written and directed by Florian Zeller
Produced by Florian Zeller, Federica Sainte-Rose, Fernando Bovaira, Simón de Santiago, Alice Dawson
Starring Javier Bardem, Penélope Cruz, Stephen Graham, Patrick Schwarzenegger, Paul Dano
Cinematography: Ben Smithard
Edited by Yorgos Lamprinos
Music by Volker Bertelmann
Production companies: Blue Morning Pictures, Mod Producciones, Pathé
Distributed by Pathé Distribution (France)
Release dates: NC
Running time: 126 minutes

Seen on 12 September 2026 at the Deauville International Centre