08/09/2026 - VENICE 2026: In Florian Zeller’s relationship drama, a husband and wife have to reexamine their bond when dubious career opportunities and fear for the future threaten to engulf them

Javier Bardem and Penélope Cruz in Bunker

It seems that French playwright and filmmaker Florian Zeller might be broadening his scope, reaching beyond his focus on intrinsic emotional struggles, painful family dynamics and shocking epiphanies. His much-celebrated The Father showed the daily experiences of an elderly man suffering from dementia. The Son showed a father grappling with his son’s depression. With Bunker, which has screened in competition at the 83rd Venice Film Festival, Zeller departs from the convention of naming the movie after a possible additional family member and instead chooses the title according to the object - a MacGuffin that proves highly controversial, around which the story keeps circling.

A bunker entails isolation, and keeping oneself safe and separated from the ailments of the world. Fear of the future, environmental threats, rising social inequality and rampant individualism are dictating the worries of our everyday lives. Those with the necessary means have taken to building fortresses not only above the ground, but also below. Spanish star architect Miguel (Javier Bardem) is being asked to build a bunker for an ambiguous rich tech billionaire (Paul Dano) in Hawaii. These people are like the pharaohs of the modern age, his colleague (Mark Gatiss) tells him: they are afraid that everything will be taken from them.

While Miguel struggles with the artistic purpose of such a “house of nightmares”, but hasn’t outright declined the job, his wife, Sofía (Penélope Cruz), leaves us in no doubt that she thinks very little of it. The family relocated to London from Madrid years ago so that Miguel could do meaningful stuff, she barks at him, angrily. Now he wants to build vanity projects for billionaires who do not care for the less fortunate or are interested in evading the apocalypse they are so afraid of with their money.

So even while broadening the scope of his themes, Zeller is once again plunging into the depths - or the dark, earthy underground world, to stay true to the title - of the fragile dynamics within family units. Sofía herself has been unhappy for some time. Her career is at a standstill. As a foreigner, she has no chance of reaching a top position in a British publishing house. The couple has come to a crossroads. People in relationships change, but what if their common path splits? “You have changed, and I don’t like what I see,” is her honest examination of their marriage. “You have become paranoid.”

Their house, with its tasteful modernist interior design by production designer Alain Bainée, is an emblem of these nouveaux riches. But it is slowly turning into a bunker itself. The same kind of worry, the same kind of fear, seems to be creeping into Miguel, whether it concerns his aggressive obsession with neighbour Toby (Stephen Graham), who has made a hole in his garage wall in which to place a window, effectively peeking into Miguel's garden, or the newest type of security system being installed.

With composer Volker Bertelsmann’s massive, booming orchestral hits, reminiscent of his work on All Quiet on the Western Front, and Bardem’s panicked eyes, the movie does instil some claustrophobia. One could be of the opinion, however, that the climax inches too much towards spoon-feeding as it teaches us about the pitfalls of social isolation. But real-life couple Bardem and Cruz, for whom Zeller specifically wrote this movie, are the ones who make this slow burner of a psychological thriller work.

Bunker was produced by Blue Morning Pictures (France) and MOD Producciones (Spain), in co-production with Pathé and France 2 Cinéma. US company Filmnation Entertainment handles its international sales.

Photogallery 08/09/2026: Venice 2026 - Bunker

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Florian Zeller, Penélope Cruz, Javier Bardem, Stephen Graham, Paul Dano
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