A new review in The Guardian of Florian Zeller’s Bunker, which screened at the Venice Film Festival, finds the director’s first original screenplay lacking the emotional depth of his earlier screen adaptations. The film, which stars Javier Bardem as an architect and Penélope Cruz as his book‑editor wife, follows the domestic fallout after the architect accepts a commission to construct an extravagant bunker for a tech billionaire.
Zeller, who earned acclaim for adapting stage material into films such as The Father (2021) and The Son (2022), has here written directly for the screen for the first time. The Guardian critic argues that the movie does not capture the intimate, authentic passion that marked those previous works, and that its examinations of alienation and inequality feel thin and unoriginal.
Rather than fully interrogating the central marriage at the heart of the story, the review says the film leans into home‑invasion suspense tropes. An extended marital‑argument sequence is cited as a glimpse of what might have been achieved had the filmmakers made the relationship the film’s primary focus. The critic nevertheless judges much of the remainder of the drama to be mediocre and eschewing psychological nuance.
The review is particularly scathing about the film’s violent finale, calling it glib and unconvincing; it notes that an off‑camera paramedic or doctor is required to offer a brief explanation of events afterwards. Overall, The Guardian concludes that even the high‑profile pairing of Cruz and Bardem cannot lift Bunker out of its creative hole, and that the film will likely disappoint viewers expecting the deeper emotional resonances of Zeller’s earlier work.