Bunker Review – Cruise and Bardem Just Can’t Dig Florian Zeller’s Minor Thriller Out of the Hole

EEven the formidable pairing of Penelope Cruz and Javier Bardem can’t save this new film from writer-director Florian Zeller – his first film made directly for the screen rather than adapted from his own stage original. It’s a shallow and unsatisfying drama without the intimate, genuine passion of his previous films like The Father (2021) or The Son (2022).

Bunker has nothing interesting or original to say about his metaphorically presented theme of alienation and inequality; the central relationship remains unexplored in favor of a so-so home invasion suspense style – although one extended scene of a marital argument showed what could have been achieved if their relationship had been the meat of the film – and the finale’s brutal ending is outrageously glib, silly and unconvincing. What you really need to hear is a voiceover from a paramedic or doctor explaining in a short sentence what was going to happen. It really sucks.

Cruz and Bardem are Sofia and Miguel, a stylish Spanish couple with two teenage daughters; The family moved to London so that Sophia, a book editor, could take a job managing the foreign literature of a British publisher’s translation list.

Miguel is a world-famous architect (what else?) who cordially tells the interviewer that he can work in any city. It is as if he himself designed the huge modernist extension to their beautiful Victorian terraced house.

Their relationship is perfectly happy until Miguel is approached by a tech billionaire (Paul Dano) to design him a luxury mega-survival bunker in Hawaii, which his eagle-eyed agent (Mark Gatiss) calls a “pharaonic” design. Sophia hates the idea of ​​taking money from the arrogant plutocrat who caused the very problems he now wants to protect himself from.

But, to Sofia’s fury, Miguel is tempted by a colossal fee: is he the man she fell in love with? Depressed, she befriends a handsome young writer (Patrick Schwarzenegger). Meanwhile, Miguel has gotten into a serious row with his grumpy, grumpy working-class neighbor (Stephen Graham), who has built a window overlooking Miguel’s garden without permission.

Maybe Miguel is already walled up in his little bunker of snobbery and emotional isolation? Yes, it very well could.

Zeller says he was inspired by Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman in Kubrick’s Eyes Wide Shut; I wonder if he also remembered the icy trials of Daniel Auteuil and Juliette Binoche in Haneke’s The Hidden?

Of course, there are some funny minor details: Eileen Atkins has a neat cameo, and we get some frantic comedy when the security-conscious Miguel is talked into installing a “fog cannon” in the house that supposedly chokes intruders with smoke. They turn out to be very good.

Gatiss’s agent is quite upset and irritated by Miguel’s squeamish hesitation – and of course we can see that the right thing for Miguel to do would be to abandon him and return to his worthy but boring project of designing a hospital in Munich. But something in me agreed with Gatiss’s sharp rebuke: “Think big!” Perhaps this film could have thought a little bigger: more direct interaction with the shady tech oligarch, more explosive confrontation in the marriage, a more explicit on-camera account of what was to happen in that final climax. This is a disappointment.