Florian Zeller wrote his latest film Bunker for real-life married couple Javier Bardem and Penélope Cruz to play a married couple on screen for the first time, a purposeful decision in order to add intrigue to a story of two people increasingly isolated from each other after 17 years together and now trying to find a new path together in an uncertain future, not just for them but for the world.

Zeller, who won an Oscar for his screenplay of The Father, uses the marriage of Miguel and Sofia as a starting point to examine not just the crisis within it, but all around them as fear of the future, environmental threats, inequality, individualism, post-pandemic isolation and other themes on the filmmaker’s mind these days, are not just limited to how we live intimate lives with each other, but how we relate to a world increasingly falling out of our grasp. Retreating into bunkers is not just a physical act here, it is also in our heads, and Zeller has created a scenario that ought to concern every one of us.

Plotwise, Miguel and Sofia are living in London, where his career as an architect has made him successful and much in demand. Against Sofia’s wishes and rising anger he accepts a rich offer to build a tech billionaire’s survivalist bunker. That guy is Andrew, played entirely on a computer screen by Paul Dano, who is eerily effective in a role Zeller says was inspired by an article about Mark Zuckerberg doing the same thing. Dano nails the ambiguity and irony of this in a riveting scene where he convinces Miguel to take the job. Sofia, after 17 years, looks at this as a dead end in their relationship, another example of completely ignoring her needs, and maybe her unspoken desire to move back to their native Spain. This could be a breaking point; it’s another project that will consume her husband, who may no longer have the same aspirations for their lives together.

With this new friction bubbling over, conversely Miguel is growing jealous of his wife’s work with a young American writer, Jeremy (Patrick Schwarzenegger), traveling through London. She is spending quite a bit of time with him, but is it an affair? Zeller keeps their business encounters dubious enough to make us even wonder what is going on, and I guess that is the point. Both Miguel and Sofia are at turning points, and the current distractions, maybe temptations, are not helping. Jeremy is simply reinforcing something she already knows: a desire for her own creativity and purpose left behind in Spain.

Do they even recognize the person they married, now living in this modern airy house of windows that can’t cover up the closed-in claustrophobia of their minds (the production design by Alain Bainee emphasizes their distance in the home). In fact, their own mutual privacy is now even threatened by the activities of the next-door neighbor Toby (a perfectly strange Stephen Graham), who is creating a hole in the wall that separates their properties, a window of sorts looking directly into their home. This sparks several confrontations between him and Miguel, who demands to know what he is doing, The dialogue is telling as Toby isn’t completely forthcoming. It adds fuel to the fire threatening everything in a marriage that still, with all of this conflict, is not quite yet ready to be called quits.

It is probably no surprise that Zeller’s first solo original screenplay was in some ways inspired by Stanley Kubrick’s final film Eyes Wide Shut, in which Kubrick cast then-married superstar couple Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman, famously mining the pair for the line between acting and real life — in that case also involving their sex life. Zeller’s motive isn’t that, and Bunker isn’t Eyes Wide Shut, but it still uses the opportunity to also blur the lines between reality and fiction using a casting decision to make that especially daunting for the audience, who may read more into it than what is on screen. We can note this isn’t the first time Cruz and Bardem have appeared jointly in a movie, but it is the first time they have played a married couple together, and both are superb here.

Cruz achingly creates a portrayal of a woman, if not quite under the influence, who isn’t sure of her place anymore. She is searching for herself in a marriage that has left her behind, and any chance for renewed happiness with it. Bardem’s Miguel is a man who thinks he is sure of himself, but slowly finds it all crashing down around him as he has to decide to take the job at the risk of losing everything else. It is nice to see Bardem — who often plays characters, some very bad, that are far from his own persona — facing very personal issues as Miguel. Playing opposite Cruz is a complex balancing act that he achieves in a moving performance where he has to come to realize what is most important in life and love.

We wish the same happy ending for Miguel and Sofia that we do for Javier and Penélope, and maybe that is also the point in this rich and fascinating film about people cautiously trying to move forward in changing times.

Producers are Federica Sainte-Rose, Fernando Boivaira, Simon De Santiago and Alice Dawson.

Title: Bunker
Festival: Venice (Competition)
Distributor: Sony Pictures Classics
Director-screenwriter: Florian Zeller
Cast: Javier Bardem, Penélope Cruz, Stephen Graham, Paul Dano, Patrick Schwarzenegger
Running time: 2 hr 6 mins