‘Bunker’ review: Javier Bardem and Penélope Cruz navigate a marriage under siege in Florian Zeller’s elegant drama

Dir/scr: Florian Zeller. France, Spain. 2026. 126mins

Miguel (Javier Bardem), a celebrated London-based architect, is approached to take on a highly lucrative new project: the client (Paul Dano) is a paranoid tech billionaire, the job is to design a survivalist bunker. For Miguel, the opportunity is intriguing, both creatively and financially. For Sofia (Penélope Cruz), his wife of 17 years, the whole concept is obscene and symptomatic of everything that is wrong with the world. Florian Zeller’s compelling and timely domestic drama sees this disagreement drive a wedge into the cracks that have already started to form in the impeccable veneer of the couple’s relationship.

The immaculate surfaces conceal increasingly unstable foundations

This is more than just a marital drama. Bunker is broader and more ambitious in scope than Zeller’s previous two pictures; it’s also more emphatic and forthright in its messaging. While, as with both The Father (2020) and The Son (2022), the focus of the picture is once again a family, the themes that the film touches upon are global. This is a picture which speaks to the uniquely precarious point at which we find ourselves: a perfect storm of unsustainable wealth disparity, dwindling resources and the looming threat of climate catastrophe and societal collapse. The film asks what we do with our privilege: guard it or share it?

Zeller has already demonstrated a knack for the elegantly expressive use of physical spaces. In The Father, the tricky, mercurially shifting apartment which provided the film’s main location left us unmoored and disorientated, echoing the experience of the central character as he stumbled deeper into his dementia. In Bunker, the immaculate house – a shrine to achingly tasteful modernism – takes on a symbolic resonance. Like the marriage between Miguel and Sofia, from the outside it looks enviably perfect. But with its hard lines and sharp edges, it’s not a comfortable space. The vast rear wall of glass is striking but leaves the couple and their two daughters exposed. It’s impressive work from the design department, which created the entire building – a convincingly opulent Edwardian conversion of the type you might find in a north-west London conservation area – on a soundstage in Madrid.

There’s also the fact that, as a London showcase for Miguel’s architectural skills, the house represents a fundamental imbalance in a relationship which has bent towards the needs of one spouse over the other. The move to London has massively benefited Miguel, who is riding high on a RIBA award. But it has stymied Sofia’s ambitions in publishing, placing a ceiling on what she can realistically achieve. Plus the very fabric of the house, like the marriage, is not as solid as it seems. It only takes a neighbour with a grudge and a sledgehammer to knock a hole through an external wall.

This last element is one of the less assured aspects of the film. Miguel starts to relate to the doomy, isolationist mindset of the billionaire, seeing threats everywhere outside his home. Meanwhile, conflict is brewing in the neighbourhood: a local man (Stephen Graham) who has been priced out of the area is converting a former garage into a place to live, knocking a window through a wall which looks directly onto Miguel’s property. With his clenched fist of a face, Graham brings a degree of menace to his scenes – but there’s not much he can do with a character that frequently feels more like a plot device than a nuanced individual.

Miguel and Sofia, on the other hand, are satisfyingly fleshed out and complex characters. Both Bardem and Cruz are terrifically strong in their respective roles; the fact that they are married in real life adds an undeniable frisson to their scenes together. Expressive, exposed performances are complemented by Ben Smithard’s cinematography, colour blocking and space being used to evoke the growing stress between them. At the start of the picture, as they recount the well-worn tale of their love affair, both are positioned in the middle of the shot, at the heart of each other’s story. But as they find themselves increasingly at odds, the visual balance shifts and they are placed on opposite sides of the frame. Meanwhile, the anxious, percussive strings of Volker Bertelmann’s textured score incrementally raise the tension.