Bunker Is a Crushing Disappointment

It’s always a pleasure to watch Javier Bardem and Penélope Cruz act opposite one another. Real-life spouses don’t always have onscreen chemistry, but these two, aside from each being an excellent actor in their own right, also possess an unspoken ease that makes them believable as a fictional couple whenever they show up in a movie. Even when it’s a cliché-riddled bit of tedium like Florian Zeller’s Bunker, a shallow study of class posing as a jagged domestic drama. Full of pained longueurs, seemingly provocative statements, and loud, often unexplained noises on the soundtrack, Bunker (premiering this week at the Venice Film Festival) has all the trappings of arty gravitas but none of the insight, artistry, or charm.

We do, however, get some lingering close-ups of its two leads, and they do what they can. A well-to-do Spanish couple living in London with their two young daughters, Miguel (Bardem) and Sofia (Cruz) have good jobs, a nice house, and a refined social circle. He’s an award-winning architect, she’s a book editor, and they’ve got a grand, modernist house in the heart of the city. When Miguel gets a lucrative offer to build a doomsday bunker in Hawaii for a powerful billionaire (played by Paul Dano, in a genuinely funny cameo), Sofia is immediately skeptical. It’s a betrayal of his ideals, of the big dreams he had of building hospitals and opera houses, edifices dedicated to some semblance of culture and the public good. Miguel himself is uncomfortable about the whole thing, too, but the money on offer is eye-popping. 

Of course, the billionaire’s paranoia and fear of outsiders is echoed in Miguel’s own life by the fact that his unfriendly neighbor Tony (Stephen Graham) is attempting to build a window on the side of his house — one that would look straight out onto Miguel and Sofia’s backyard, which they see as an invasion of their privacy. Miguel is seemingly unaware of his own hypocrisy as he becomes increasingly anxious about his family’s safety inside their well-appointed house. He gets alarms replaced, adds some newfangled “fog-cannons” to the security system (which spray smoke when intruders enter, thus supposedly disorienting them), and starts to fear even the delivery guy — all elements that Zeller, betraying his otherwise highly controlled, downright funereal filming style, plays up for thoroughly unconvincing laughs. (There’s a slapstick bit with a delivery package and a door chain lock that would be too stupid even in a Jim Carrey movie.) Don’t worry, though, all these moral contradictions will be pointed out to Miguel during a lengthy, turgid, climactic argument with Sofia that goes nowhere because nobody says anything interesting. 

There are good ideas in Bunker, but Zeller’s drama veers between the painfully obvious and the annoyingly manufactured. Early on, when Miguel lets out the family cat after staring frustratedly at the giant hole in his neighbor’s wall, we can already tell that the cat’s disappearance will become a plot point. At her job, Sofia meets a young, up-and-coming American author (Patrick Schwarzenegger) who seems incapable of answering any question without giving her a long, piercing look first. But it’s not really his knowing glances that get to her, it’s what he has to say about life — a series of supposedly revealing observations that basically amount to the same “Seize the day” bullshit we’ve all heard a million times, and which a book editor would have heard two million times — that Zeller unfortunately treats as some sort of life-altering prophecy.

The writer-director seems to live regularly at the edge of plausibility when it comes to his scenarios. The last time Zeller was at Venice, he premiered his grueling depression drama The Son, which I found deeply moving but which just about everyone else seemed to despise. (You can read my colleague Alison Willmore’s well-argued pan here.) What others found unbelievable about that film, I saw as an effective part of the story’s tragic nature, its portrait of a well-meaning but solipsistic parent’s obliviousness. Which is all another way of saying that I was actually looking forward to Bunker. I still admire Zeller’s previous work, but with Bunker, I must sadly join the ranks of the unconvinced. It’s a crushing disappointment.

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