For all 2026’s ills, there’s a gorgeous silver lining running through the year: the Penélope Cruz renaissance. The Spanish actress was on fuego in fantastically saucy The Invite, and she shimmies with tragic chutzpah in the upcoming La Bola Negra (also showing at LFF and perhaps the best film of year, FYI).
Director Florian Zeller (The Father, The Son) wrote Bunker specifically for Cruz and her husband Javier Bardem, and the pair are a marriage made in celluloid heaven. However, Zeller is circling at least one too many thematic wagons, with the result that none of them is cornered with conviction.
We open at a London restaurant where Cruz’s literary editor Sofía and her starchitect husband Miguel (Bardem) are explaining to their fellow diners why they fell for each other and how perfect their 17 years of married life has been.
Penélope Cruz and Javier Bardem in Bunker
Tamara Arranz
Then, cut to a jolting HAMMER! BASH! HAMMER! as a hole is being pummelled through the garden wall of the couple and their two young children’s incredibly covetable home. The suggestion is of a psycho neighbour intruder. Are we in eat the rich territory cinema here? Well, maybe, and maybe not quite…
Because then along comes someone far, far more wealthy than these two in the form of multi-billionaire Andrew (Paul Dano, blink and you might miss him), who wants Miguel to design a bunker to protect him from a feared apocalypse and the inevitable blood-letting of the super-rich by the world’s dispossessed. “I don’t want to end up with my head on a spike,” explains Andrew.
“It’s a pharoahonic project,” enthuses Miguel’s architect partner Simon (Mark Gatiss). Sofía is not so convinced about Miguel undertaking a selfish project for a billionaire, and less keen on her beloved husband for selling his soul for big bucks.
Sofía rails against a meaningless life where they have prioritised their careers (or more accurately Miguel’s) and rages at her husband for being swayed by money more than her feelings. Ah, this is a crumbling marriage drama then? Er, yes and no…
Because soon we discover who has smashed a viewing hole in their wall. And there’s no one audiences could relish more as the unfriendly nutjob next door than Stephen Graham (as unmoneyed Toby, quietly, menacingly baring a grudge against the gentrification of his local area). But, like the other themes, this is only partly the story. There’s yet another stand running on the sidelines with Patrick Schwarzenegger’s famed author, who Sofía becomes enamoured with.
Penélope Cruz in Bunker
Studio Canal
Bardem and Cruz, looking incredible at 52 (will she ever get old?), create a delicious frisson of marital unease, while Graham’s screentime is sorely brief. And a confident, unnerving directorial edge cuts through all the domestic tension.
However, for all its prickly entertainment, those wagons can never quite be corralled into cohesive order. And, however riveting, it’s tough to forgive the yawningly on-the-nose manner in which Zeller puts everything to bed.
Bunker was screening at the London Film Festival and is on general release from February 19; whatson.bfi.org.uk/lff