Bunker, 2026.
Directed by Florian Zeller
Starring Penélope Cruz, Javier Bardem, Stephen Graham, Mark Gatiss, and Patrick Schwarzenegger.
SYNOPSIS:
Follows a married couple of 17 years. The husband is an architect who accepts a controversial project to build a survivalist bunker for a tech billionaire. This decision leads his wife to question their marriage.
The Father and The Son-director Florian Zeller returns to the realm of family based character study with Bunker, an intended conversation-starting drama that’s a little too on-the-nose to get beneath the surface of its themes and naval-gazing characters.
The titular bunker could have multiple meanings; there’s the literal one that family father and award-winning architect Miguel (Javier Bardem) has been tasked with building by an unnamed tech billionaire suffering from self-serving apocalyptic anxiety. It could also refer to the family home, which is ensconced in affluent London suburbia, a glass-windowed prison to this group of troubled people. Then there’s the unsettling neighbour (Stephen Graham), who is self-renovating his own bunker with a garage conversion that encroaches on the family’s privacy, seeding a burgeoning sense of unease that grows throughout the movie. Then of course there’s the metaphorical emotional bunker that each family member is trapped in.
Bunker opens with Bardem recounting how he first met Penelope Cruz’s Sofia. It’s a sweet story, but one layered with misdirect and untruths. The camera holds her gaze as she just listens to her husband, smiling, teary-eyed, as he performs a routine he must have repeated throughout the course of their 17 years together. It’s symptomatic of their relationship, and as we fast forward to an art gallery visit we see Sofia longingly staring at a painting of a couple spooning in a bed, longing for that level of love and connection again. It’s a story about reappraisal of your own life and that of the people around you. A mid-life crisis movie.
Whether that works or not depends on how you feel about the family at the heart of the film. The drama is the stuff of soap opera. The events that Miguel and Sofia are going through feel like a single season arc written for the parents of the kids on The O.C., and that’s not a slight on that peak slice of mid-2000s television.
Even when the plot occasionally shifts to a commentary on the fragile state of a world and the morals involved in working for a billionaire, it’s used as a plot device to add further conflict between the couple. The dilemma might have carried more weight had the family not lived in a £10 million London home, which appears to have everything but a bunker.
Bardem is the standout, delivering a real nuanced, human turn, when the subject matter could easily have seen him deliver showreel histrionics. Cruz doesn’t fare as well, asked to be the disaffected wife, she is reduced to a spectral presence, floating around the house, or sharing chemistry-free interactions with Patrick Schwarzenegger’s hot young musician. Even Stephen Graham, who’s there to provide the societal class-gulf talking point, feels underserved, despite being able to still do so much with the little he’s given.
There’s nothing terribly wrong with Bunker, it just kind of exists in it’s only little bubble of brainstormed thoughts that are never truly developed. It even builds to a rather shocking ending that’s tonally jarring and more than a little silly. Ultimately you leave the film feeling as though the characters are probably in exactly the same place they were when we first met them, and that might just be the point.
A slow burn piece of theatre on film, Bunker is a beautifully shot, exquisitely acted, but ultimately hollow experience.
Flickering Myth Rating – Film ★ ★ / Movie ★ ★
Matt Rodgers – Follow me on Twitter
Originally published October 12, 2026. Updated October 13, 2026.
