Through Spanish stars and Hollywood gloss, “Bunker,” above all else, channels the sensibility of a French playwright. Recognizing that is key to unlocking this tonally idiosyncratic marital drama, which swings between bourgeois farce and psychological thriller, tackling a raft of topical concerns by bringing them into the house.
Of course, it’s useful context that writer-director Florian Zeller previously won an Oscar for “The Father” — this is, after all, a film about another prizewinning European expanding his professional ambitions into the Anglosphere. Here, that’s Miguel Moreno (Javier Bardem), a noncommittal Londoner, winner of architecture’s top honor and husband to book editor Sofia (Penélope Cruz), who wants more than anything to move the family back to Madrid.
She’d also like to rekindle some spark of romantic passion — and in his own way, so would Miguel — even as the couple’s diverging professional trajectories keep pulling them apart. (Casting actors who’ve been onscreen foils longer than they’ve been an actual couple pays off beautifully: when Zeller says he wrote these parts specifically for Bardem and Cruz, believe him.)
Alas, those domestic cracks are beginning to widen — a point the film quite literally hammers home by juxtaposing its title card against a sledgehammer shattering concrete. On one side of the divide is Miguel, aghast that someone would dare breach his Piet Mondrian-inspired abode; on the other is neighbor Toby (Stephen Graham), the last holdout of a pre-gentrified borough who’s just trying to dig himself some sunlight. This is not a subtle affair.
Nor does it need to be, not least when the film plays for droll laughs. Hell, Toby’s practically doing the Spaniards a favor, letting some light into their airless world, a London nowhere-land where international elites sleepwalk through chic vernissages, gazing at tableaux depicting nothing. Zeller has great fun poking little holes in a rarefied social scene he clearly knows well, though he doesn’t quite thread that parlor-room frivolity with acute psychological menace as effectively as Paul Verhoeven does in “Elle.”
Caustic, if never quite a comedy, “Bunker” builds ambient unease toward a more violent third act. Until then, it moves at an unhurried pace, following the couple as they lumber through dreary workdays — a slow burn that sets up several internal narrative payoffs.
Unfulfilled at the office and unlikely to advance, Sofia chaperones a young American author (Patrick Schwarzenegger) whose latest bestseller, we come to learn, articulates Sofia’s middle-aged malaise better than she can herself. A homebody and remote worker par excellence, Miguel dithers not only about whether to accept an unconventional offer from a tech billionaire but first about whether he should — gasp — fly to California to even meet the man.
Hewing to stage logic, tech mogul Andrew (Paul Dano) eventually opts for Zoom, beaming in like the very Wizard of Oz to grant all of Miguel’s financial wishes — provided he builds him a bunker. And not just any bunker, but a luxury one, complete with a sauna, a pool and a voice-activated oxygen distribution system, allowing this doomsday device to reproduce the very elite inequities that presumably helped accelerate the need to wait out a collapsed world in the first place. Again, subtlety lives next door.
Ironically, the Morenos are hardly strapped for cash — a point made visually, again and again, by the sheer square footage of their vast London home. “Bunker” is in no way cramped or claustrophobic, but it is stagey in a more dramaturgical sense, treating that house as a center of gravity around which its narrative and thematic elements orbit. Miguel’s anxiety is, after all, one born of affluence: He responds by investing in increasingly elaborate home-protection systems, setting up comic payoffs that eventually turn acutely dramatic. This is Chekhov’s gun as a philosophy of decoration, in which everything placed onstage must ultimately prove its utility.
“Bunker” embraces that ethos, creating a closed circuit in which images and motifs recur, mutate and acquire new meaning. In Act One, we laugh at the artist who paints painstakingly detailed canvases only to bury them beneath black paint. That image of the black box later finds an unexpected echo within the Moreno home, while Miguel himself begins to confront the same impulse: By accepting the bunker project, isn’t he devoting all his considerable knowledge and skill to creating a space designed to disappear from the world?
If anything, the film’s greatest fault lies in indecision, in its less-than-successful toggling between two modes it can never quite mesh. Going more satirical or more theatrical might actually bring greater balance, allowing Zeller to more fully explore the career questions lurking beneath his story. Can you stay true to yourself when the wider world comes knocking? And can you create truly great work on someone else’s terms? The questions are valid; you just wish “Bunker” had given them a more open home.
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