#TIFF26: “BUNKER” REVIEW

By Nicholas Porteous

A high-profile architect (Javier Bardem) is recruited to build an underground bunker for a famous billionaire, just in case of the apocalypse–all while his marriage (to Bardem’s real-life wife Penélope Cruz) is sputtering towards its potential end.

Florian Zeller‘s Bunker isn’t a conventional narrative–one beat leading directly to the next. It feels more like a series of provocative scenarios that gradually compound on top of each other to make a broad statement about modern existence. Its tone is difficult to pin down. Structurally, it reminds me of an episode of Curb Your Enthusiasm, and it isn’t without a sense of humour, but it’s also very earnest–by no means a comedy. It is occasionally successful at threading this seriocomic needle. A meeting with the unnamed billionaire–played with a fantastic, understated mischievousness by Paul Dano–is a perfect oddity. But most of the time, Bunker falls short of profundity–playing its more obvious ideas as though they’re revelations. When a friend asks how Bardem and Cruz can stay married for over a decade even though we grow into different people over time, there’s no lingering feeling in the room that this is the sort of baseline question you’d get on yahoo answers.

There’s a fun, meta quality to seeing Bardem and Cruz play a married couple. While I think it’s unlikely this highly strained relationship is a reflection of their real lives, watching a pair of top-tier, Oscar-winning spouses work together is undeniably entertaining. It’s unfortunate that the script they’re working from doesn’t feel as deep as their performances. Zeller slowly builds a tapestry of tension, but he collapses any fun ambiguity between these conflicting ideas by Bunker‘s far too clear-cut ending.

Bunker releases in early 2027