The way in which we tell the origin story of a romantic relationship says a lot about how we look at our partners in the present tense. That much becomes clear in the opening scene of Bunker, the third feature from theater director-turned-middlebrow film auteur Florian Zeller. We’re seated at a late-night London dinner party where celebrated architect Miguel Moreno (Javier Bardem) regales the table with the story of how he met his wife, book publisher Sofia (Penélope Cruz). His account seems passionate and romantic at the outset, but the longer he goes on, the more banal their relationship lore becomes, with Miguel even confessing that on their first date he was brought to tears not by the incredible sensitivity of his future wife, but by an allergic reaction to her cat. With tight close-ups, cinematographer Ben Smithard isolates the spouses sitting diagonally across from each other at the table, underlining that Bunker is a story of entrenched individuals who have erected too many walls around themselves to truly be together anymore.
In the gray zone between a melodrama, a morality play, and a home invasion thriller, Bunker is one of those European prestige films with Big Themes and zero subtext. What emotional depth it does mine from a story based on the Argentine comedy thriller The Man Next Door (Gastón Duprat, Mariano Cohn, 2009) is mostly sourced from the phenomenal dual screen presence of Bardem and Cruz, a power couple of world cinema in real life. After the Anthony Hopkins-starring dementia thriller The Father (2020) and the more questionable Hugh Jackman vehicle The Son (2022), Zeller once again proves he’s at his best when working with his star-studded cast in front of the camera. The undeniable Bardem-Cruz chemistry grants him a gorgeous artistic palette here, one with which he eagerly paints over the myriad gaps of a lackluster screenplay and its subpar execution.
Appropriately, Bunker’s story mostly concerns itself with how we gloss over the narrative gaps in our relationships through the stories we tell ourselves. Both Miguel and Sofia diligently sink their teeth into their careers in architecture and book publishing, but the lack of meaning they now derive from their work points to a simple fact Stanley Kubrick explored so frighteningly in Eyes Wide Shut (1999): how a couple — in Kubrick’s final masterpiece also fittingly portrayed by real-life spouses Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman — simply needs to fuck. That climactic point, Bunker never reaches. Instead, Zeller’s script throws enough curveballs at the spouses for them to at least have each other’s backs again once the end credits roll.
In this way, Zeller has made a film about crises. Its first manifestation comes in the form of a new neighbor who ruins the sanctity of the Morenos’ palatial London estate by breaking open their bordering garden wall. Stephen Graham dutifully slips into the role of a British chap who sees no problem with sledgehammering through the confines, in the process unwittingly exposing a gaping hole in the Moreno marriage. It triggers waves of paranoia in Miguel, just as he’s commissioned to design a cavernous doomsday bunker for a panicked tech billionaire, cannily portrayed by Paul Dano as a Muskian neurotic.
Never shying away from grand moralizing, Zeller wags his finger here by pointing out how fucked up it is that these technocrats can ruin the planet with their apps and whatnot, only to cower underground while they watch the rest of us burn. Sofia voices the same sentiment, turning the morally fraught commission into an ultimatum for their passionless marriage. Making the point all too clear, she sermonizes that an architect should build windows onto the world, not bunkers in which we embalm the pharaohs of the internet age. Conversely, Miguel is tempted to fly to Hawaii and build an inverted pyramid underground, because it will piss off his wife, who he suspects is in the first stages of an affair with an idealistic novelist from New York.
With all the key elements in place, the schematics play out too nicely in Bunker, a film that should surprise absolutely no one over its runtime. Even a third-act burst of sudden violence — the much-needed Big Moment for these kinds of populist arthouse films to justify their competition slots at prestigious festivals like Venice — fails to pry this highly linear film off its laid-out tracks. Formally, Smithard’s cinematography is also merely adequate, flexing gorgeous stars framed against luxurious yet often drab backgrounds, interspersed with the occasional primary color, giving Bunker the sheen and lull of late-style Pedro Almodóvar.
At the risk of underlining the point too much, the only reason the middling Bunker plays out well enough is that Cruz and Bardem prove once more that they’re some of the most magnetic screen icons of contemporary arthouse film. After Rodrigo Sorogoyen’s Cannes entry The Beloved, Bardem again slips into the role of a renowned artist, the type of pained man in the throes of a midlife crisis that this Spanish thespian can portray with his eyes closed and his hands tied behind his back. But however fascinating it is to watch him play it with so much gusto, there is much more to explore in the restricted characterization of Sofia. Cruz can easily do the big splashy thing, and, tragically, Sofia is a woman who wants to do all of that but lacks the light in her life to radiate as she used to. Her confined spirit waiting to be set free once again is what gives this boxed-in film something resembling a beating heart. The biggest shame, perhaps, is that Zeller didn’t see that more clearly. Sofia wields the key to let out the pent-up energy of a hermetically sealed script, but this fresh gust of wind is barely felt in a film that, much like its characters, is still left in a state of figuring out how to open up to the outside world.
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