FESTIVAL REVIEW
Florian Zeller’s third film, and his first not adapted from a play, is Bunker, in which Javier Bardem and Penélope Cruz play a married couple going through marrital crisis. He is Miguel, a celebrated architect, and she is Sofia, a book editor. They moved to London with their two daughters to accommodate Miguel’s ambitions, despite Sofia having more opportunities back in Madrid. Two things add further strain to their relationship. First, a neighbor, Toby (Stephen Graham), opens a hole in the wall separating their properties because he is converting an old garage into a home and wants to install a window for natural light. Then Miguel is approached by a mysterious billionaire (Paul Dano), determined to pay him an enormous amount of money to build a survivalist bunker in Hawaii, a project that would have the family moving again.
Zeller wrote the film specifically for Bardem and Cruz, particularly intrigued by what might come from seeing a real couple play a marriage in crisis. Despite working and acting together several times before, Bunker marks the first time they play an established married couple. Predictably, they are fantastic, both having great individual moments but truly coming alive whenever they share the screen. The two capture a couple who have lived together for years and slowly lost their passion for each other in ways that feel remarkably natural. Our familiarity with them as a real couple certainly adds something to that, but much of the authenticity comes from smaller details within the performances themselves, which make even the most mundane interactions feel a little more loaded. One of them might walk into the kitchen barely acknowledging that the other is there, or lie in bed slightly farther than what they are used to. Those details elevate the film so much that you secretly wish there were far less intentional dialogue and that Zeller would simply concentrate on observing this couple’s routine.
Instead, the film does have dialogue, and it does have a plot. More than that. It has a THEME, that is spelled out in very obvious ways. Zeller makes his point: Miguel’s selfish motivation, increasingly centered around work and success, has been building a psychological bunker around him, while the window his neighbor is trying to build represents the connection with the outside world that he once had and has now lost. That metaphor also represents his marriage.
It is a noble message, and an important one in a post-pandemic world where people increasingly look toward their own success and close the door to true human connection. We hear this from the neighbor, through Sofia, through her boss, and finally in a monologue that essentially summarizes the film’s whole point. And in case you’ve missed it, the sentence is repeated again. I’ve complained in the past about how movies such as All of a Sudden can make their important themes too academic and dense for their audiences, but Bunker goes to the other extreme, stating everything so blatantly that it distracts from the experience. Characters stop becoming real people and become ideas making Zeller’s point. They don’t seem to have lives outside of whatever the film currently needs them to represent.
In terms of filmmaking, Bunker shows some welcome improvement for Zeller compared with The Son in almost every aspect. He once again returns to a very elaborate and creative set to center his story around, this time the glass and red house where the couple lives. It is a sleek place that constantly impresses us and helps clarify that Miguel shouldn’t want more. The cinematography is also a clear step up, now with intentional blocking, such as placing Cruz alone on one side of the frame and leaving the other half empty, visually representing her place in the marriage. Lastly, instead of the ultra-serious and indulgent score Hans Zimmer composed for The Son, Volker Bertelmann was brought aboard to create another nervous, propulsive score in the vein of Conclave and A House of Dynamite. It suits the film rather well, constantly hinting that something intense might happen.
It eventually does, in an awkward scene that involves the neighbor practicing a strange kind of Rear Window espionage. To get there, we get heavy foreshadowing, including a demonstration of how a home invasion could happen, largely so we understand it when something similar eventually does. There is also a long, preachy monologue awkwardly delivered by Patrick Schwarzenegger, proving once again to be one of the least natural actors working today.
FINAL THOUGHTS
Bunker is certainly a step up from The Son, but remains very far from the greatness of The Father, which is still the crowning achievement in Zeller’s inconsistent film career. Here, his heart is in the right place; he just needed to trust the audience a little bit more.
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- 25Bunker#25 of 38
- Where to watch
- Coming soon
- Where to watch
- Coming soon
Play trailer
- Original title
- Bunker
- Director
- Florian Zeller
- Cast
- Penélope Cruz, Javier Bardem, Stephen Graham, Paul Dano, Patrick Schwarzenegger, Chloe Conh, Leah Conh, Mark Gatiss
- Screenwriter
- Florian Zeller
- Composer
- Volker Bertelmann
- Cinematography
- Ben Smithard
- Editor
- Raphaël Sohier, Laure-Anne Darras, Matthieu Fichet
- Country
- Language
- French