Venice Review: Florian Zeller’s Bunker Is Bad Melodrama and Curiously Anti-Art

The most interesting thing about Bunker is a moment of visual repetition. Early on, a husband and wife, Miguel (Javier Bardem) and Julia (Penélope Cruz), snicker amongst themselves, as lovers do, at an art opening, amused at three abstract paintings that are uniformly black—a process, the Captain Jack Sparrow-styled curator explains, that involved covering already-painted still lives. The film then calls back to this a while later, when the couple’s neighbor covers a hole he knocked out of their backyard wall with a jet-black piece of tarpaulin that briefly mirrors the paintings that Miguel and Julia scoffed at. For a moment, you start to wonder about the cosmic alignment that might have caused this to happen, but—like most things in Bunker—the eventual answer underwhelms.

Before we get back to all that, it’s important to note that those two sections of the film also point to its least appealing aspects—namely the ideas about art itself and its farcical depictions of working-class characters, either of which the director and writer of this film, Florian Zeller, seems to not understand or, worse still, openly despise. The former is embodied in the character of Andrew (the aforementioned neighbor, played by the great Steven Graham), who is attempting to renovate his uncle’s shed as a living space, since he can’t afford the rent in the neighborhood he grew up in anymore. 

In order to let in the light, Andrew decides to build a window—not into the roof or front side of the shed, but one looking into Julia and Miguel’s garden, where their 10-year-old daughter plays and almost everything in their modernist house can be observed. When Miguel confronts him about this, Andrew plays the “people around here used to look out for each other” card. Which struck me as implausible, given that he never even ran it by them. This, of course tests Miguel’s liberal mores, but despite his best efforts, the man can’t help but let words like “lawyers” and “money” into the convo, which hardly helps matters. Andrew’s first response as he walks away is to drop the C-word, and as the film progresses, Zeller leaves you guessing what other obscenities this man might be capable. 

This potential for insidious behavior acts as just the B storyline in Bunker, which is actually a film with more than one architectural plan in mind. As flagged by the Caspar David Friedrich postcard on Miguel’s office wall, he and Julia are both creative types: respectively an architect so renowned that a tech billionaire (a fun, Musky cameo from Paul Dano) is willing to pony up a blank check for him to build the survival shelter from which the film takes its name (yes, it’s a metaphor); and a translator’s assistant at a bustling London publishing house where a flavor-of-the-month author with a crush on her (a hunky, bearded Patrick Swartzenneger) is about to publish his latest novel. (Her professional insights on this tome appear to begin and end with her suspicion that the protagonist is secretly a stand-in for the author.)

If this all sounds like a sniffly way to talk about a juicy slice of melodrama, it’s not. There are more than a few great filmmakers working today with the ability to make this kind of material sing, but I sense Zeller’s talents lie elsewhere—even an out-of-sorts François Ozon could have squeezed more camp from this script than Bunker manages. What ultimately saves it are the actors, not least the plug-and-play chemistry you get by casting Cruz and Bardem; this marks the happily married heartthrobs’ seventh movie together but just their first since Asghar Farhadi’s Everybody Knows eight years ago. If anything, their connection might be too warm for a film ostensibly about a marriage on the rocks, but they’re an undeniable pleasure to be around. Most credit for this can go to Cruz, who comes into the role on a bit of a heater after her acclaimed turn in Olivia Wilde’s The Invite earlier this year.

The movie duly lights up whenever she’s onscreen, despite her not getting a huge amount to work with, aside from an opening dinner scene in which Bardem, much like his intro in Rodrigo Sorogoyen’s Cannes film The Beloved, recounts the story of when they first met—allowing Cruz, in a gorgeous close-up, to give a masterclass in shifting expressions and break out that weapons-grade smile. A beat later in the art-show scene, she pauses over a nice painting of two lovers in a morning embrace, one that Zeller, as with the tarpaulin, will finally call back to with all the subtlety of a sledgehammer through a garden wall. The film eventually leaves us with two messages: the first is a kind of assurance that it’s best not to worry too much about working-class revolt (God forbid); the second is that a plaintive image is like an “open window,” an ideal that, according to Zeller, we should all be striving for in our art and in our lives, and that a more challenging one can only mean the opposite. But I guess he would say that.

Bunker premiered at the 2026 Venice Film Festival and will be released by Sony Pictures Classics.