James Y. Lee
We tend to associate the concept of “doomsday prepping” to paranoid conspiracy theorists, who spend their waking hours tying specious bits of political evidence together in order to verify loosely-threaded conclusions about how the world will end, and who will be responsible for it once it arrives. We don’t usually think that our top 1% of economic earners belong in their ranks—until you realize that for years now, the ultra-wealthy have been investing significant amounts of resources into creating underground bunker facilities in order to completely shield them from the apocalypse. The end of the world, for these billionaires, is anything that could threaten their wealth—fortunes that are tied irreversibly to the market, which would perish instantaneously should the world order collapse. That means a political revolution whose mission might be the execution of the hoarding wealthy. That means the climate crises that tech, oil, and industry executives are bloodthirstily accelerating in the name of incalculable profit. That means nuclear war, which they also have no problem attempting to colonize Mars to escape.
Some time into Florian Zeller’s Bunker, a mysterious tech leader and billionaire Andrew (Paul Dano, in a chillingly scene-stealing… Zoom call?) reaches out to Miguel (Javier Bardem)—a reputable and comfortably living celebrity architect—with a request to construct his own proprietary doomsday bunker for the ultra-wealthy. Miguel flinches, not just at the sheer bizarreness of the offer, but also because of the deranged amounts of money involved in Andrew’s deal. Pressed to find a morally acceptable justification for the project, Miguel asks Andrew why—why he is so willing to shield himself from the whole rest of humanity should a world-dooming catastrophe occur, and why he wants to create the house of his worst nightmares instead of the house of his dreams. Andrew offers up two questions of his own to Miguel in response, separately benign yet utterly spine-chilling together: “Do you have kids?”, and then seconds later, when Miguel says yes, “Have you been seeing the news lately?”
The magic trick of Dano’s performance in this scene is how disturbingly casual Andrew is about this whole situation. What would normally be an existential inquiry so terrifying it would plunge anyone under a certain level of financial comfort into permanent mental stasis is simply a resolvable problem for Andrew—one among an infinite number of inconveniences that he knows he can solve away with money. It is a moment of unfettered nihilism written and performed to razor-sharp accuracy about the grim spirit of our world today, where Silicon Valley—destined now to be the collective Horseman of Death we stare down before the end times—is frantically looking for a way out of the mess they’ve made. It is also the only noteworthy scene in Florian Zeller’s Bunker, a film that is otherwise content with whacking the audience over the head with a relatively inert and obvious tale about paranoia, the complicity of the bourgeois, and the correlation between wealth and silence.
Zeller is flirting with a breed of anti-capitalism-lite here, one relatively willing to forgive the sins of the bourgeois if their heads are screwed on right, and if they refuse to succumb to the darkness of isolation and paranoia. Indeed, Miguel and his wife Sofia (Penélope Cruz) are doing relatively well for themselves, even if their aspirations for their lives in London shoot higher than they already stand. Where Miguel is an architect who’s just been approached with the bunker-building gig of several lifetimes, Sofia is a relatively frustrated publisher, stationed at a high-profile English publishing house waiting to work in the fiction department, but being pushed aside because of her foreign nationality. Meanwhile, parenting their two children and their cat, Blue, has proven to be somewhat of a difficulty, but more distressing to Miguel is the fact that their next door neighbor, Toby (Stephen Graham) is punching a hole into their garden wall in order to get some sunlight for his garage—a seemingly impulsive act that Miguel finds an unforgivable breach of privacy.
For 17 years, Miguel and Sofia have seemingly been happily married, able to sustain themselves through their high-profile artistic disciplines—rubbing shoulders with other members of the wealthy, frequently attending art galleries, heading to dinner at fancier locations. But the introduction of Andrew’s bunker project, and the compromise of Miguel’s values that it represents—especially for a man who wanted to build aesthetically robust public-facing establishments—seems unforgivable to Sofia. Their relationship quickly starts skating on thin ice once it becomes clear that Miguel is, at the very least, ambivalent about taking the project—Andrew is offering a sum of money incomprehensible to even this specific family. All the while, Sofia starts an unexpected emotional connection with Jeremy (Patrick Schwarzenegger), a new author who’s joined the publishing house’s ranks, and the paranoia that’s already long infected Andrew’s mind starts seeping its way into Miguel’s, as he begins wondering about how to defend his family from what seems like a danger coming for everything he has in a threatening city.
If The Father and The Son are proof of anything in particular—outside of Zeller’s wild inconsistency in delivering tales about mental illness—it’s the fact that Zeller seems to have a solid sense for the weight of production design, which designer Alain Baineé deserves significant kudos for with Bunker. Miguel and Sofia’s house, as wide in scope and air as it is, is also plagued with sharp lines and angles, the trappings of modern architectural design often responsible for aesthetically sterilizing the environments it touches. While not perpetually mutating in on itself like Anthony’s house in The Father, its towering size still represents a great deal of Zeller’s intended ideas—a reckoning with wealth and its proportional relationship to isolation from others, both on a physical and spiritual level. Miguel in particular, and perhaps on a subconscious level, wants little more than to escape the most populated regions of the city, where the apocalypse may very well be simply the threats of everyday urban living as someone of his stature coexists among the dispossessed.
Unfortunately, the sharpness of Bunker‘s ideas ends there. True as it is that Zeller is striving for a place of real contemporary resonance, the most unfortunate traits of The Son‘s obviousness in its writing returns to continually plague Bunker at nearly every turn of significance. Themes are explicated with overbearing metaphorical weight during fierce arguments, characters make choices that do nothing to complicate the heart of Bunker‘s intentions, and visual motifs are so obviously telegraphed you begin patiently waiting for when they might recur later on. This kind of clichéd obviousness does the direction of this film no favors. Its optimism is misplaced where it could be productively honest about the resentment engendered by wealth inequality, it reduces both Miguel and Sofia to shallow archetypes of bourgeois frustration, and its insistence on battering audiences with its ideas about the imperative of refusing self-imposed isolation makes it patronizing where it could have been sincere.
Cruz and Bardem are, at the very least, doing the best they can with this sort of material, riffing off of their chemistry as an actually married couple—as they’ve done several times in the past—to allow Miguel and Sofia’s relationship to feel decently rounded out. But it doesn’t really help the case of any actor here that they’re being made to deliver lines where they tell each other that they’re “digging holes instead of opening windows” or “building a bunker of their own inside this house” as jabs at the characters they’re talking to—undeniable sincerity hiding beneath eye-rolling levels of blinding clarity. When contemporary films about class struggle have steadily become renowned for their subtly literary, resonantly sharp usage of motifs and characters and motivations—look no further than the glut of near-masterpieces South Korea has been putting out over the past decade!—you begin to wonder why Bunker sized itself up to the competition and still refused to make anything more of itself.
Regardless of how you feel about either The Father or The Son, and regardless of their greater interest in mental health than most anything else, both of these films are portraits of bourgeois familial despair, and how it turns the heart of a family inside out for the worse. But they’re also far more intimate tales than their class backdrops would suggest, only seeking anything that resembles significance within the confines of the domestic stories they portray. For once, Zeller has decided to expand his reach outwards from the domestic and into the sociopolitical, but in the process, he keeps showing his hand too eagerly, far too often. In doing so, his film betrays its legitimate naïvety about the economic state of the world, a misplaced hope that those in positions of privilege can be so easily woken up to their need to connect with the world that surrounds them. You can smell its insincerity from the fact that we see little of the material consequences of Miguel and Sofia’s eventual awakening, and that its final image is one that grounds us once more in the emotional state of their domesticity rather than the consequences of their economic position. In other words, it is Zeller himself retreating back to familiar territory, even after he’s professed to expand his awareness about the world that surrounds him—and that, right there, is Bunker‘s ultimate disappointment.
