Name: Bunker
Director: Florian Zeller
Cast: Javier Bardem, Penélope Cruz

Florian Zeller has built his cinema, until now, out of theatre — his own, adapted. Bunker, which world-premiered in the main competition of the 83rd Venice Film Festival, is the first time the French playwright has written directly for the screen, and he has used the freedom to seal Javier Bardem and Penélope Cruz inside a marriage with no exit. Bardem plays Miguel, a London architect handed the commission of his career: to build a survivalist bunker for a tech billionaire. Cruz is Sofia, his wife of seventeen years, who watches the job pull them both into a world of money, paranoia and fear — and begins to wonder what is left of the two of them.

The move is not as abrupt as it looks. The Father and The Son, the films that made Zeller a name in cinema after a life in the theatre, were chamber pieces about people trapped in a single relationship and an unreliable reality; Bunker keeps the chamber and lowers it underground. Zeller has said he wrote it with Kubrick’s Eyes Wide Shut in mind — a slow-burning war between two married people who have drifted apart — and the reference tells you where his ambition lies: not in the thriller’s machinery but in what a marriage looks like under a pressure it cannot name.

The premise is almost a fable of the moment. A billionaire who can afford to prepare for the end of the world hires an architect to design his refuge, and the commission becomes a slow poison: the closer Miguel gets to that fortress of private survival, the less certain his own house feels. Zeller builds the film around the anxieties the super-rich have monetised — ecological dread, the fear of collapse, the instinct to wall oneself off — and then refuses to treat them as spectacle. He has pointed to the Argentine film The Man Next Door (2010), another story of a wall between neighbours, as a touchstone; an unsettling presence next door becomes the crack through which the couple’s fear leaks in.

Around the two leads Zeller has assembled Paul Dano, Stephen Graham, Patrick Schwarzenegger, Mark Gatiss and Eileen Atkins, but the film’s real charge is the pairing at its centre. Bardem and Cruz have shared the screen since Jamón Jamón in 1992, married in the years between, and turned their history into some of Spanish cinema’s most watched performances; asking them to play a couple whose intimacy is curdling is a piece of casting that does half the directing. Shot mostly in Madrid with a week in London, Bunker lets them work in the register they know best — two people who understand each other too well to lie convincingly.

What a first screening cannot settle is whether the metaphor holds its nerve. A bunker is a heavy symbol, and a film that leans on it risks turning a marriage into a lecture about inequality; Zeller’s control of tone in The Father suggests he knows the danger, but the thriller form he is borrowing from can flatten the very ambiguity that makes his theatre work. The film’s best insurance is its faces: in close-up, Bardem and Cruz can hold a contradiction that no set-piece can.

Bunker competes for the Golden Lion, awarded on 12 September by the jury led by Maggie Gyllenhaal, before Sony Pictures Classics opens it in North America. There was an odd rhyme to its timing: hours earlier the same festival had unveiled, out of competition, a four-hour documentary about a real tech billionaire — as if the Lido wanted to screen both the bunker and the man who might build one.

Tags: Venice Film Festival, 2026, Penélope Cruz, Javier Bardem, Bunker, Florian Zeller