Penelope Cruz and Javier Bardem Have Marriage Troubles in the Inert 'Bunker'

Sofia (Penelope Cruz) and Miguel (Javier Bardem) seem to have an idyllic life. They’ve been together for 17 years, have two children, and live in a gorgeous house in London. Sofia is a literary agent and Javier is an award-winning architect, the kind who is famous enough to get recognised at parties. But small things are beginning to weigh on them. Their eldest daughter won’t get off her phone. The cat’s gone missing. Their next door neighbour (Stephen Graham) has knocked a hole in their garden wall. And a mysterious billionaire wants Miguel to design a luxury apocalypse bunker where he and his allies can ride out the end times.

Writer-director Florian Zeller got his start on the stage before making the leap to fil by adapting his own play, The Father, to great success. The follow-up, The Son, disappeared without a trace after a brief festival run. Alas, film number three is not called The Holy Ghost, but Bunker is his first one written specifically for the screen, and he’s landed a real-life husband and wife acting power couple for the leads. They are a formidable pair, with shelves weighed down by the many awards they’ve won. This is the exact pairing you’d want for a drama about the conflict between personal and professional to the backdrop of money and paranoia. If only they’d been given the material to make that happen.

Sofia and Miguel are a jet-setting cosmopolitan pair who speak Spanish at home and in asides in front of their English friends and acquaintances. They moved to London to help his career, while hers is stagnant because of her nationality. They make snide digs at one another now and then, the kind with plausible deniability, and the distance between them is slowly growing. When Miguel is approached by the billionaire’s team, a trio of stiff lawyers who talk like spies (the film’s funniest scene), Sofia is disgusted by the prospect. Why waste your architectural talents on an arrogant tech bro’s doomsday fantasy? But Miguel is undeniably intrigued. It would be, as his agent (Mark Gatiss) notes, a chance to build the modern-day equivalent of a pyramid for the Pharaohs. Plus the payday is eye-wateringly high.

Sofia’s complaints are all agreeable, but the film struggles to confront the big picture. It wants to use this one loser’s bunker dreams as a parallel for the metaphorical bunker of the couple’s lives. After a testy confrontation with the vaguely racist neighbour who now has a direct view into their home, Miguel becomes overtly concerned with security. A sleazy salesman convinces him to install fog cannons as a deterrent, which only leads to a big old mess. Meanwhile, Sofia grows more interested in an author client (Patrick Schwarzenegger, cute but bland) whose debut novel is a treatise on nihilism. Actually, she doesn’t, not really. We’re meant to believe this is happening but Bunker gives us no real sense of her supposed attachment. It seems like the kind of thing that would have played off-stage in the play of this, were that real. Indeed, the stagey quality of Bunker is tough to shake. Everything is limited to a handful of indoor locations but they still lack the claustrophobia that would make Miguel’s growing paranoia land with the audience. Zeller’s direction is stagnant but not purposeful. The film calls out for a Michael Haneke to take the reins.

We only meet the billionaire once, via a Zoom call, and Paul Dano runs away with the entire film. Blatantly committed to a Mark Zuckerberg impression, this over-wealthy brat speaks a mile a minute, gesturing with his hands and maintaining a beady gaze as he explains his desires for a special secret bunker in Hawaii. If there is one upside to our current hellscape timeline of billionaires ruining everything, it’s that it might be impossible for writers to go over the top in depicting their evils. This one talks openly of wanting not only to make a safe haven should the 99% rise up against him, but one where he can maintain the social hierarchy that keeps him at the very top. Voice-activated oxygen controls that can be turned off by him and him alone? Sure, why not?! Maybe Dano should be playing the Facebook monster in The Social Reckoning.

This is the one scene with real fire in it, and outside of that, Bardem and Cruz are left to deal with inert dialogue, a clunky central metaphor, and annoyingly loud banging music. The relationship drama is old hat, and its resolution feels cheap. Bunker touches upon grand issues—wealth inequality, the rigidity of class in Britain, climate change, social unrest, billionaires’ mere existence as a cancer—then lets its focus wander elsewhere, leaving a lot of loose threads on the table. The actors are trying, but it’s their natural chemistry as husband and wife that’s doing most of the heavy lifting. One cannot help but feel that this was a play that Zeller redrafted for film while excising the crucial meat of the narrative. If you want to make an Eat the Rich film, you need the fury to back it up.

Bunker had its North American premiere at the 2026 Toronto International Film Festival. It will open in late 2026.