Bunker Review: Cruz and Bardem Can't Save Zeller — SkimNews
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- Bunker is writer-director Florian Zeller's first film written directly for the screen rather than adapted from his own stage work, following The Father (2021) and The Son (2022).
- Penélope Cruz and Javier Bardem play Sofia and Miguel, a Spanish couple who relocate to London so Sofia can edit a UK publisher's foreign-literature-in-translation list.
- Miguel, a world-famous architect, is tempted by a colossal fee from Paul Dano's tech billionaire to design a 'pharaonic' survivalist mega-bunker in Hawaii — a commission Sofia rails against.
- Sofia befriends a young author (Patrick Schwarzenegger) and Miguel picks a fight with working-class neighbor Stephen Graham over a disputed overlooking window, while Mark Gatiss plays the billionaire's frustrated agent urging him to 'think big.'
- Zeller has cited Kubrick's Eyes Wide Shut and, the reviewer suspects, Haneke's Hidden as inspirations; the review finds Zeller's 'shallow' social-thriller treatment wastes what an extended marital-argument scene showed the marriage was capable of.
- Eileen Atkins has a crisp cameo and the 'fog cannon' home-security gag lands as the film's bright spot, but the review calls the violent finale 'outrageously glib' enough that an off-camera paramedic must narrate what happened.
- IndieWire's parallel review headlines Zeller's film a 'heavy-handed social thriller,' aligning with this reviewer's verdict that the film needed a more direct engagement with its iffy tech oligarch and a more explosive marital confrontation.
Why it matters: The pairing of Oscar winner Cruz with Bardem — fresh off his Oscar-nominated turn in Being the Ricardos — was positioned as the main commercial lift for Zeller's leap from stage-adapted chamber pieces to a screen-original social thriller, and the review concludes neither star nor premise delivers on that promise. Zeller has now stumbled on his first non-adaptation, undercutting the argument that his previous acclaim was transferable to original material.
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