Atlas Dug: Zeller Teases the Comedy of Obligation
It’s become increasingly clear celebrated writer Florian Zeller has a difficult time killing his darlings when it comes to adapting his own plays, perhaps nowhere more evident in his third feature, Bunker, a film sabotaging its structurally sound foundations with the ostentatiousness of its dialogue. It’s been eight years since married celebrity couple Javier Bardem and Penelope Cruz last worked together (their last being 2018’s Everybody Knows, a maudlin misfire from Asghar Farhadi), and they do indeed make the cost of admission worthwhile in what feels like an inherently watchable but ultimately superficial examination of the need to repair social, collective connections in a world unraveling through emotional detachment driven by various self-appointed and conditioned notions of segregation necessary in maintaining capitalism’s stronghold. Strangely, it’s a film which bungles any elegant rumination on its subtexts by both talking too much but saying too little.
Miguel (Bardem), a wildly successful architect in London, enjoys a comfortable life with his wife Sofia (Cruz) of seventeen years and their two young daughters. Suddenly, professional opportunities unveil deep seated resentments between them. Sofia is a successful editor, but the publication house she works for will never allow her to manage their Fiction department, since she’s a foreigner. She yearns to return to Madrid, a fantasy washed over when Miguel, who has just accepted a major award in his career, has considered taking on a new contract for a billionaire (Paul Dano) who wants to build a luxury doomsday bunker in Hawaii. While Sofia pursues a minor flirtation with an American author (Patrick Schwarzenegger), Miguel becomes embroiled in a nasty predicament with their next door neighbor (Stephen Graham), a working class native who has busted a hole in their shared wall to put a window in a garage he’s modifying as a studio. Caught between two social hierarchies, Miguel is forced to decide what kind of world he should contribute to as a man who ‘builds windows or digs holes.’
August Wilson was a playwright who covered similar sentiments to more notable effect in his 1985 play Fences, and Zeller seems to be retreading this malaise to explore ennui amongst the upper middle class, inherently wealthy members of society who are still required to tend to the mortal slings and arrows of commonplace needs from time to time. The set-up is intriguing, as xenophobia, gender, gentrification and intergenerational conflicts all intersect intermittently in Zeller’s edifice, and one can see how this would work better on stage, dependent upon its actors to convey the tenderness and rage, resentment and yearning its principal characters are oscillating between.
Bardem, strangely, plays a character who has direct parallels with two other high profile performances of his from this year, including an onerous film director estranged from his daughter in The Beloved as well as resuscitating the iconic villain Max Cady in the latest remake of Cape Fear, where animosity amongst class conscious neighbors deepens a penchant for vengeance. Much like the Hugh Jackman character in Zeller’s overblown melodrama The Son (2022), Miguel is an oblivious patriarch whose rote desire for fortune and glory blinds him to the damage or neglect inflicted on those around him. He reads like the apologetic architectural response to Howard Roark in Ayn Rand’s The Fountainhead, where the notion of self-sacrifice is something worse than innate human failing, as in, her words, “it is precisely the self that cannot and must not be sacrificed.”
Speaking of obfuscation,’the most prominent subtext in Bunker, dealing specifically with everyone hiding ‘what lies beneath’ every interaction, Zeller seems to really be wanting to touch on Plato’s allegory of the cave, but shines a megawatt light on his subjects when the flickers of candlelight would suffice. A painter the couple mock at a pretentious art gallery who has a series where all his portraits are painted over in black, it becomes clear (so to speak) Zeller might not be able to tell the difference between levity and satire. Instead, it is one of two major metaporical art elements repeated as real-life visualizations, recycled as a black tarpaulin hiding the ridiculous hole busted out of the wall overlooking the couple’s garden. As could be predicted, Stephen Graham’s purpose becomes exploitatively clear in some third act histrionics where Zeller patly resolves his characters’ miseries purely for the cathartic comfort of the audience, only succeeding by the final frames in making good on many contrivances it had been dancing around.
Added to the film’s issues are wasted opportunities with the supporting cast. Eileen Atkins pops up to tell Sofia to enjoy being young and beautiful while it lasts, Paul Dano gets on Zoom to explain his fears about the collapse of the contemporary social order (what will Tarantino think?), and Patrick Schwarzenegger cannot transform large swaths of on-the-nose reminiscences about the female protagonist in his bestselling novel beyond a staginess which the film struggles to recover from.
Elegance, as it means to Miguel, is the relationship between culture and silence, which makes Bunker feel as graceful as a sledgehammer based on its own parameters. It’s a pity considering some absolutely poetic moments, in which Miguel explains how architects work to create people’s dreams and how he has to contend with creating something meant to reflect a nightmare. Still, Bardem and Cruz have the wattage of watching a Burton and Taylor circle one another (though this is more 1963’s The VIPs than 1966’s Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?). Zeller instead makes a film which ironically, for the wrong reasons, recalls Shelley’s Ozymandias: “Nothing beside remains. Round the decay/Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare/The lone and level sands stretch far away.”
Reviewed on September 8th at the 2026 Venice Film Festival (83rd edition) – In Competition. 126 Minutes.
★★½/☆☆☆☆☆
