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A London realtor would likely describe the handsome East End home of Miguel and Sofia Moreno as a Tardis. Its quaint, aged Victorian exterior belies the vast modernist construction within: all tall, clean planes of concrete,
timber and glass over multiple split levels, leading out to a compact but exquisitely landscaped walled garden that the same realtor might call an urban sanctuary. Not that anybody ever really goes out there, save for the Morenos’ gorgeous, slate-gray Abyssinian cat Blue; life is busy for this upscale Spanish expat family, and their combined professional and personal interests — architecture, books, their phones, their things — tend to keep them indoors. In Florian Zeller’s compelling new film “Bunker,” this enviable house isn’t the secure structure of the title, but it also kind of is; the Morenos’ lives are turned so inward, they can’t see how locked-down they really are.
The insular existence and myopic outlook of the moneyed classes in these times of societal division and virtual connection are not exactly fresh themes for a dramatist of Zeller’s stature: “Bunker” certainly flirts with obviousness as it measures the pitfalls of this family’s privilege against the more extreme social self-isolation of the billionaire set, and invites us to consider how much difference there is between them. Its visual metaphors are not subtle; its verbal unpacking of them, even less so. But the film gets its hooks in you; even when it feels familiar, it usually feels true. And that’s because Zeller’s words are often so well-chosen and well-turned, and sound especially good in the mouths of Javier Bardem and Penélope Cruz, two actors who can find seams of meaning and feeling in far more pedestrian dialogue.
When a new acquaintance asks literary editor Sofia (Cruz) what has kept her and high-flying architect Miguel (Bardem) together for 17 years, her answer briefly stops you in your tracks: “Things last when you consider them fragile,” she says, explaining the subsequent increased effort to handle them with care. “It’s when you perceive things as solid that they eventually break.”
It’s a great line on its own; delivered by Cruz with a note of somewhat steely sadness, it’s especially piercing. But does she mean it? Her marriage looks frailer the longer we spend in their company, and it’s clear she and Miguel aren’t maintaining it as carefully as they might. When their crammed schedules permit them time together, they speak past each other, their eyes never meeting for very long at a time. Their teenage daughter Lucia (Chloe Conh), forever adrift between headphones, hardly ever speaks to them if she can help it, though her little sister Rosa (Leah Conh) is young enough to miss them when they’re gone. The family’s dream home (a magazine-pristine and coolly atmospheric feat by production designer Alain Bainée) certainly looks solid, but proves quite permeable — beginning one morning when a gaping hole suddenly appears in the garden wall.
Turns out their working-class neighbor, Toby (Stephen Graham), has plans to turn the garage next door into a studio apartment, and wants it to have a window — why not one that looks out directly onto the Morenos’ attractive property? Miguel, like any private homeowner, can see plenty of reasons why not; Toby resents his objections, just as he resents the gentrifiers steadily colonizing his native corner of London. From this darkly funny, semi-absurd bad-neighbor dispute — one in which, by any legal standpoint, the wealthier man is in the right — “Bunker” sets out a more complex, conflicted moral inquiry.
Miguel, who has recently won the U.K.’s top architecture prize for a design ethos fitted to what he describes as London’s “combination of culture and silence,” is unnerved by this violation of his sealed-off home — by the threat of the outside world crashing into his own. But he’s equally disquieted by a potentially lucrative proposal that comes his way from a famous, unnamed tech mogul (a coldly smarmy Paul Dano, appearing only in the dead air of a Zoom chat), who wants Miguel to design him a massive underground bunker on his private Hawaiian island, where he and his family could live longterm in the event of an unspecified apocalypse. All the most influential billionaires are building them now, the man argues, anticipating “a full-scale collapse of the system we live in.” (He doesn’t specify that it’s largely a system of their own making; that’s not the kind of accountability that got him and his ilk where they are today.)
Sofia is disgusted that Miguel would even consider taking a huge sum of money from a client who “represents everything wrong with the world today,” for a job that further entrenches his remove from the real world. Miguel, on the other hand, is moved to wonder if his own home and family are secure enough, a neurosis that leads the film down productive avenues of farce — as he splurges on a ludicrously elaborate and inevitably malfunctioning security system — and thriller both psychological and domestic.
All those modes rest on a crisply folded series of ironies that, much like the home at the film’s center, are just a bit too perfect; from the title downwards, the symbolism of “Bunker” is so precisely engineered that you wish it allowed a little more room for interpretation. Lest you don’t get the meaning, Zeller’s lovely, lucid writing is always on hand to reiterate it — twice, in the case of a neat, and then too neat, closing line. Still, it seems, a playwright first, Zeller could stand to trust his images more: They’re good images, too, shot with eerie cashmere stillness by Ben Smithard.
But if you finally want to reach inside “Bunker” and mess it up a little bit, the film remains riveting in all its obsessive-compulsive meticulousness — in large part because Bardem and Cruz, both so fragile and so solid, give it actual human dimension. There’s always something extratextually fascinating about watching onscreen lovers who are also offscreen lovers, particularly when they’re enacting a fractured relationship: We saw it with Burton and Taylor in vehicles both great and calamitous, we saw it with Pitt and Jolie in the latter’s arrestingly exposed “By the Sea,” and we see it with these Spanish royals, who alternate observe, ignore and react to each other with such intuitive, anticipatory intimacy that you feel you know them a little better for having watched this.
Both are superb on their own terms: Bardem, both gruff and smooth, finds sharp, subtle comic layers in Miguel’s steady loss of alpha control, while an intensely poised Cruz, often seemingly seconds from either a single tear or a primal scream, reaches the desolate melodramatic depths of feeling that she usually reserves for Pedro Almodóvar. (Is it a coincidence that she does her most ferocious emoting here against a wall of kitchen units in Almodóvar’s practically patented pillarbox red?) But it’s together — or apart while together — that they’re most magnetic. Finding and silently playing the subtext that Zeller doesn’t write, they threaten the security of this immaculate, imperilled household from the inside.
