Javier Bardem and Penélope Cruz have drawn attention at the Venice Film Festival with Bunker, a psychological thriller in which the real-life husband and wife play a couple whose marriage begins to fracture under pressure.
Directed by Florian Zeller, the film had its world premiere in competition on Tuesday. The 126-minute production, made in English and Spanish, also stars Stephen Graham and Paul Dano.
Bardem plays Miguel, a celebrated Spanish architect living in London with his publisher wife, Sofia, played by Cruz, and their two daughters. Their apparently comfortable life begins to unravel when Miguel accepts a lucrative commission from a technology billionaire.
The project is to design an elaborate survival bunker in Hawaii, intended to protect its owner from a possible collapse of civilisation. Sofia regards the scheme as morally hollow, particularly when set against her husband’s more socially valuable work on hospitals and opera houses.
The couple’s arguments are sharpened by a dispute with their working-class neighbour, Toby, played by Graham. After Toby alters a garage wall to install a window and create a studio, Miguel responds with offers of compensation and the threat of legal action.
For Sofia, the row exposes a deeper change in her husband. His willingness to use wealth and lawyers to impose his will suggests that the values he once claimed to hold have been eroded by privilege.
Marriage and morality collide in Bunker
Zeller, whose feature-film debut The Father won Anthony Hopkins an Oscar, uses the bunker as both a literal construction project and a symbol of Miguel’s growing desire to shut out the world around him.
The director offsets the increasingly tense domestic drama with moments of dark humour, including a gallery sequence built around a collection of entirely black paintings and the secrecy surrounding the billionaire’s identity.
There are also deliberate visual parallels between the gallery works and the covering placed over Toby’s disputed wall, reflecting Zeller’s fondness for carefully mirrored details. At times, however, the symbolism is more obvious than subtle.
The film’s strongest asset is the central partnership. Bardem and Cruz move easily between English and Spanish, giving the marital confrontations an intensity that feels grounded in their characters rather than in theatrical spectacle.
Bunker is among the films competing for the Golden Lion at this year’s Venice festival, which runs until Saturday. It is due to open in the UK in February.
