Real-life couple Penélope Cruz and Javier Bardem star in this psychological thriller from The Father’s director Florian Zeller, a tale of growing and changing together and apart, of the sacrifices made for each other, and of the values that can distance and separate. Though unarguably entertaining, Bunker certainly thinks it is more high-brow that it actually is – where the themes it attempts to explore are of genuine value and originality, its clichéd script and overt explanation of every last detail gives it an atmosphere resembling something more like The Housemaid than Parasite.
In its opening – and perhaps most promising – scene, married couple Miguel and Sofia reflect on how they met and what has kept them together during a dinner with friends. It is a testimony to Cruz and Bardem’s real-life relationship and acting game that in quick glances and furtive under-the-table exchanges it becomes clear that something is amiss. Residents of a gorgeous house in London, carefully curated by Miguel, their lives are thrown into disarray when he receives a special request from a billionaire – to build him a bunker. Yet while Sofia is sickened by the concept, Miguel isn’t so certain – at best, he decides to entertain the idea, which disgusts his wife even more. This clash, in opinion, in values, slowly threatens to unravel seventeen years of marriage, as Sofia questions her future and Miguel grapples with what could be the offer of a lifetime.
On paper, the premise of Bunker is an excellent one – often long-term couples are depicted in disagreement or boredom, but rare does a story come along in which the concept of values, changed somewhere along the way, is presented as a deal-breaker, a cause for disagreement or worse. Yet, beside a couple of late-night kitchen arguments, Cruz and Bardem are never allowed to take it a step further – the dinner scene is the most we get in terms of subtle misunderstandings, hidden meanings, white lies. Instead, what Bunker provides is a series of filler scenes and archetypal characters who exist solely to serve one or the other – there is Stephen Graham as Toby, for instance, the working-class to Sofia and Miguel’s upper class, who wants nothing more than to put a window in his poor garage-turned-studio, a request beaten down by Miguel for aesthetic and privacy reasons. Then, there is Paul Dano as “Andrew” – or, because Bunker seems so reticent to say it, the man who created the most famous social media platform in the world, and who directly inspired Zeller after leaked reports he was building an underground bunker in Hawaii. Miguel meets with him via video call in Dano’s sole scene, and while he does a good enough job of joining the food chain, the one percent to Miguel and Sofia’s upper class to Toby’s working class, it is so aggressively overt that one cannot help but laugh (and indeed, the Royal Festival Hall erupted the second Dano’s face appeared). Even the finale feels too neat of a knot for what could have been such a complex character study – true to Miguel’s word, in the end Bunker refuses to go anywhere below surface level.
Bunker screened at the London Film Festival and will be released in UK cinemas on 19 February 2027.
