First came The Father, a terrifying and heartbreaking story of dementia that placed us within the deteriorating mental state of an elderly man. Quietly yet powerfully building steam throughout the pandemic-stricken awards season of 2020, the film would win an Oscar for Anthony Hopkins’ transcendent lead performance, as well as for the screenplay adapted from the play. Next came The Son, another adaptation on mental health, this time the focus shifting to the depressed teenage son of Hugh Jackman. But instead of dealing with this sensitive issue with poise and ingenuity, it rubs our faces in it while screaming “THIS IS IMPORTANT!” for two ungodly hours.

By the Christian Trinity, The Holy Spirit should have been next. Or, if you want to go by the collected stage works of writer Florian Zeller, The Mother would have been the next logical choice. It was staged in London in 2015 and New York in 2019, the latter portion featuring Isabelle Huppert in the titular role. Great as it always is to have Huppert on the silver screen, the harsh criticism and preachiness of The Son might have paused Zeller’s ambitions to continue adapting his own works. Here he is now with Bunker, a wholly original work so overwrought and underdeveloped that one might wish he would give up on cinema altogether.

A booming thud encompasses the black screen, giving way to a dinner party conversation featuring married couple Miguel and Sofia Moreno, played by real-life married couple Javier Bardem and Penélope Cruz. At the tail end of a long-winded story about how they first met, a guest claims that even “the greatest love stories can start with a misunderstanding.” While offscreen, he says this with so much emphasis that Zeller might as well have superimposed the text across the screen throughout the rest of the runtime. Next, we cut to a brick wall being demolished. More than just an obvious metaphor of cracks appearing in a sturdy marriage, it’s the literal destruction of the wall separating the London home of the Morenos and their neighbor Toby (Stephen Graham). Tensions run high as Miguel contests the project, with Toby viewing him as a rich foreigner pushing out the more humble locals.

But even with Miguel’s thriving architecture company and Sofia’s tenure as a book editor at a fancy publishing house, they are still nowhere near the top of the social pyramid. They get a taste of the top when a highly secretive and powerful billionaire (Paul Dano, appearing in a Zoom call so clearly filmed separately from everyone else) attempts to hire Miguel to design an underground apocalypse shelter in Hawaii. It is the modern-day equivalent of building a tomb for a pharaoh, with all the moral repercussions of indirectly playing a hand in the destruction of the world.

Cruz’s character is the mouthpiece for those ethical questions. What has this billionaire so spooked that he needs this bunker built immediately and to be able to sustain life for years to come? Would Miguel be turning his back on the rest of the population if he used his talents for just one person? Zeller does not mince his words with these arguments, explicitly having Cruz explain them to the audience ad nauseam. Don’t worry if you somehow don’t get it the first time, because she’s going to continue to make them throughout the film.

That aspect is the brain of the film, while the heart lies in the crumbling of a marriage. Each partner has their unhappy qualities about the other, such as Miguel’s macho jealousy of a new hotshot author (Patrick Schwarzenegger) and Sofia’s homesickness for Madrid. Again, Zeller offers no subtlety, nor any poetry to his dialogue. It’s all quite rote, with Schwarzenegger being given an embarrassingly on-the-nose monologue about the wastefulness of material wealth. Even when Bardem and Cruz are firing on all cylinders, they are still trying to make gold out of leaden words.

Zeller’s moderate skills at craftsmanship includes crisp lighting by Ben Smithard, taking a page out of Pedro Almodóvar with bright colors encompassing walls. I can’t blame Zeller or Smithard for using the association cheat code of blocking Cruz against a red background. What I can blame them, as well as editor Yorgos Lamprinos and composer Volker Bertelmann, for is giving this thriller a rotten core. Even with all the pristine window dressing, this is an unbelievable story with an offensively oversimplified message about the power of loving each other. If that’s the intent, then why did Zeller make a film so easy to hate?

Bunker had its North American premiere at the 2026 Toronto International Film Festival. Sony Pictures Classics will release the film at a later date.