Of all the grievous sins committed by Florian Zeller’s utterly unbearable third feature, Bunker, perhaps the single most baffling is that there’s no bunker in it. Sure, the characters spend a lot of time *talking* about bunkers, and they might spend their lives siloed away in the various metaphorical bunkers of privilege and self-obsession, but this tale of an architect hired to build a doomsday bunker has no actual bunker whatsoever. Instead of that vaguely interesting premise, Zeller instead opts for an insufferable story of a wealthy marriage on the rocks, every point he’s making here feeling at least three years too late in one of the year’s dullest, most dim-witted movies.
Now, of course a film has no obligation to actually be about what I assumed it was going to be about, but the plot Zeller has chosen to hone in on is so boring that it’s hard not to spend Bunker’s overlong two-hour-plus runtime wishing it was going somewhere else. Javier Bardem plays the architect, Miguel Moreno, a Spaniard living in a nice, ultra-modern house in London with his wife Sofia (Penelope Cruz, marking the ninth time this real couple have played on-screen lovers), whose own career in publishing has become stuck after they moved away from Madrid.
Their marriage has become strained and airless as Miguel’s career has taken prominence. This is only exacerbated when Miguel is asked to build a doomsday bunker for a tech mogul (Mark Zuckerberg in all but name, played in a bored-looking cameo by Paul Dano) at the same time as the couple’s new working-class neighbour Toby (Stephen Graham) has knocked a hole in their garden wall to instal a window in his garage. Intrigued by the opportunity and money of the bunker and enraged by the window, Miguel starts letting his marriage collapse beneath him.
The problem is that it is impossible to care. Everything in Bunker happens so slowly and at such an emotional remove that the stakes are non-existent. It doesn’t help that it’s simply dismal to spend time with all these characters; Miguel and Sofia are of the now very exhausted archetype of an awful out-of-touch rich couple we should love to hate, but Graham’s Toby is a rude, grubby, xenophobic yobbo too. Zeller smugly tells us that both sides of the class divide are awful and expects that to come across as clever rather than alienatingly misanthropic and self-satisfied. It’s the sort of Succession-lite approach that only works if you’re able to make this anti-society anger funny, which Zeller really is not.
The writing never gets better from here. It’s a small cast, so most of the characters are afforded a monologue or two, and they’re all thuddingly obvious, Zeller’s cultural commentary around as incisive as any given political thread from a disaffected Twitter user. We’re told that billionaires are bad, that their building bunkers is a sign of our terrible times, and that kids are on their phones too much. These things are all true, but isn’t a single novel observation or even turn of phrase in Zeller’s script, while Miguel and Sofia’s marital disagreements are all entirely generic and delivered with limited conviction by Bardem and Cruz.
This reaches its nadir during the entirely superfluous subplot involving Sofia’s publishing house as they prepare a UK book tour for a hot young American writer (played by Patrick Schwarzenegger). Schwarzenegger, despite being probably only the sixth or seventh main character, is given the monologue that’s meant to tell us what to take away from the film (Bunker is nice and condescending like that), but the speech he’s afforded is embarrassing. A bunch of sophomoric waffle about how time erases legacy, it’s the sort of thing that could pass for an attempt at profundity if a 15 year old said it, but not an apparently gifted novelist in his 30s.
If Bunker has one thing going for it, it’s (fittingly) the design work. Harsh lines and right angles are everywhere in the Moreno’s house as well as the vanishingly few other locations they visit (though it is inspired by the 2010 Argentinian film The Man Next Door, Bunker often feels like it started life as one of Zeller’s plays), and there are some striking enough shots. At one point, he even puts a tearful Cruz in front of a deep red kitchen wall, perhaps to momentarily trick us into thinking we’re watching an Almodovar film. But this is so far from enough that it may as well be nothing. At my screening, someone brought their dog into the cinema with them, which is pretty unacceptable, but instead of feeling annoyed by it, I was instead envious of the little creature as it drifted off snore-ily, because, in its sleep, I still had to watch Bunker, and it did not.
