Bunker Review: Javier Bardem and Penélope Cruz Shine in Timely Psychological Thriller About Privacy and Tech Billionaires
Venice Film Festival: The real-life partners play a couple whose marriage becomes strained when Bardem’s character considers designing an apocalypse-proof safe house for a billionaire (Paul Dano)
by Alex Kaan 9 September 2026
Courtesy of the Venice Film Festival
As the threat of war, climate change, class inequality, and unregulated technology continue to define the 2020s, the cinema of our modern era is largely more interested in providing escapism through fantasy or nostalgic period films. In Bunker, the latest film from Oscar-winning writer-director and playwright Florian Zeller (The Father), all these topics are instead the foundation of a thorny morality tale situated at the intersection between the personal and the political.
Driven by an alluring premise (an architect’s marriage unravels when he is asked to design a luxury shelter for a tech billionaire), Bunker is a timely psychodramatic thriller elevated by the superb lead duo of Javier Bardem and Penélope Cruz, whose real-life relationship surely informs their magnetic intimacy as performers.
Courtesy of the Venice Film Festival
Miguel Moreno (Bardem) is as much of a celebrity as an architect can be. He lives in London — in an immaculate home, as to be expected — with his wife, Sofia (Cruz), and their two young girls. While his career continues to flourish, Sofia isn’t wholly satisfied with her position as a literary agent. Despite her fluency, the fact that English isn’t her first language keeps doors closed at her publishing house, and she’s also suffering from a simmering frustration with her married life, the cause of which she isn’t quite ready to voice to Miguel yet. Miguel, meanwhile, is most preoccupied with a spat with his neighbour (Stephen Graham), who has hammered an illegal hole in the wall of an intended studio that looks straight at the Morenos’ garden and transparent house.
All those tensions are exacerbated when Miguel gets a lucrative offer to design an opulent shelter in Hawaii for the billionaire founder (Paul Dano) of a tech giant, a plot inspired by a leaked story on Mark Zuckerberg. His agent (Mark Gatiss) is giddy — describing the project as building pyramids for “today’s pharaohs” — but Sofia is adamantly opposed, appalled at the ethics of helping the ultra-rich maintain their safety in an apocalyptic future which they helped create. As Miguel becomes tempted by a once-in-a-lifetime undertaking of incomparable scale, he pushes Sofia closer to a talented 30-year-old writer (Patrick Schwarzenegger).
Courtesy of the Venice Film Festival
The unsubtlety of Bunker’s moral position will be a sticking point for the film’s detractors, and some will class the film as heavy-handed. This is not a cryptic thriller with niggling threads and tough-to-crack meanings, but rather a movie that pays off every single plot point in a manner that can often be predictable. That said, the framework works in Bunker’s favour, as the straightforward, play-like narrative allows the performances to take centre stage, particularly Javier Bardem’s searing portrayal of a man’s tragicomic descent into paranoia. As a thriller, the tension doesn’t unfold in the plotting, but in the many naturalistic two-hander scenes between Bardem and Cruz, who brilliantly articulate the quiet tragedy of a couple’s slow disintegration.
Bunker also benefits from a strong supporting cast, including Patrick Schwarzenegger as a pretentious hipster novelist and Stephen Graham as a brash neighbour. But the highlight is a fantastic Paul Dano as a creepy Zuckerberg/Musk pastiche utterly removed from whatever shred of humanity he once had. The role may be more of a cameo, but he leaves a lasting impression in an extended sequence of a morbidly hilarious Zoom call with Bardem’s Miguel.
Elegant in its simplicity, Bunker is a solid thriller hinging on a refreshingly topical moral dilemma and the stellar performances of its two leads.