Bunker review – Cruz and Bardem just can’t dig Florian Zeller’s shallow thriller out of a hole

Even the formidable pairing of Penélope Cruz and Javier Bardem can’t save this new movie from writer-director Florian Zeller – his first created directly for the screen, and not adapted from his own stage original. It’s shallow and unsatisfying, a drama without the intimate, authentic passion of his previous movies like The Father (2021) or The Son (2022).

Bunker has nothing that interesting or original to say about its metaphorically showcased theme of alienation and inequality; the central relationship is left unexplored in favour of so-so home-invasion suspense styling – although one extended marital-argument scene showed what might have been achieved if their relationship was the film’s point – and the violent finale ending is outrageously glib, silly and unconvincing. An off-camera paramedic or doctor actually has to be heard explaining in a brief sentence afterwards what is supposed to have happened. Very lame.

Cruz and Bardem are Sofia and Miguel, a stylish Spanish couple with two teen daughters; the family has moved to London so that Sofia, a book editor, can take up a job managing a UK publisher’s foreign literature in translation list.

Miguel is a world-famous architect (what other sort is there?) who cordially tells an interviewer that he can work in any city. It seems as if he might himself have designed the huge, modernist rear extension to their handsome Victorian terrace house.

Their relationship is perfectly happy until Miguel is approached by a tech billionaire (Paul Dano) to design for him a luxurious survivalist mega-bunker in Hawaii, what his beady-eyed agent (Mark Gatiss) calls a “pharaonic” project. Sofia hates the idea of taking cash from the kind of arrogant plutocrat who has caused the very problems that he now wants to be insulated from.

But to Sofia’s rage, Miguel is tempted by the colossal fee: is he the man she fell in love with? In her depression, she finds herself becoming friendly with a handsome young author (Patrick Schwarzenegger). Meanwhile, Miguel has got into a serious row with their chippy, stroppy working-class neighbour (Stephen Graham) who has built a window overlooking Miguel’s garden without permission.

Could it be that Miguel is already getting walled up in his own petty bunker of snobbery and emotional seclusion? Yes it very much could.

Zeller says he was inspired by Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman in Kubrick’s Eyes Wide Shut; I wonder if he also had somewhere in the back of his mind the icy ordeal of Daniel Auteuil and Juliette Binoche in Haneke’s Hidden.

There are certainly some amusing incidental touches: Eileen Atkins has a crisp cameo and we get some boisterous comedy when security conscious Miguel is persuaded to install “fog cannon” in the house, which supposedly smother intruders in smoke. A fat lot of good they turn out to be.

Gatiss’s agent is intensely frustrated and irritated by Miguel’s squeamish hesitation – and of course we can see how the right thing for Miguel to do would be to turn it down and go back to his worthy but dull project of designing a hospital in Munich. But something in me agreed with Gatiss’s snappish rebuke: “Think big!” Perhaps this film could have thought a bit bigger: a more direct engagement with the iffy tech oligarch, a more explosive confrontation in the marriage, a more explicit on-camera account of what is supposed to happened in that final climax. This is a disappointment.