Writer: Florian Zeller, Mariano Cohn and Gastón Duprat
Director: Florian Zeller
Just because you’re paranoid, doesn’t mean they’re not out to get you, as architect Miguel discovers in Florian Zeller’s new film Bunker screening at the BFI London Film Festival 2026, a piece that expands the writer-director’s interest in families, relationship dynamics over time and moments of fundamental shift within them. Known for his stage work that has been adapted for the screen – including The Father – Zeller’s piece, co-written with Mariano Cohn and Gastón Duprat, has a theatrical staging, structured around his trademark long and insightful dialogues that slowly reveal layers of truth as art, love and living decently intersect with wealth and career success.
Well to do Spanish couple Miguel and Sofia have the perfect home and two children, living in London where he has recently won an architecture prize while she has an editorial position at a leading publisher. Troubled when a neighbour knocks through their garden wall to install a window, the following weeks see their perfect life start to unravel, especially when Miguel is offered a project that might compromise his family’s principles.
The concept of the bunker has multiple meanings and in classic Zeller fashion applies equally to the psychological state of the characters who feel trapped in who they are and increasingly isolated from themselves as well as who they think they used to be, as it does to the three physical bunkers that appear in the film – and re-watches will no doubt reveal multiple further meanings. Miguel and Sofia’s house, the neighbour’s converted garage and the inverted pyramid a tech billionaire wants to build are all physical interpretations of the bunker offering through these storylines places of protection and shelter but also confinement where windows are needed and feelings of entrapment may threaten the safety of those inside. This is captured in Zeller’s vision through the beautiful but soulless home that Miguel creates, the film – as the client explains to Miguel – is interested in the space where engineering and practicality meet imagination, or more simply where what you see and what is really happening co-exist, creating paranoia.
The film’s major coup is the casting of real life couple Penélope Cruz and Javier Bardem also long married as the central couple dealing with a complex period of strain in their relationship. They are both watchful and incisive actors who capture the easy familiarity of people long together but slowly put a distance between them, something Cruz does notably in the opening scene with a look of concealed frustration that flickers across her face as he tells the story of their first meeting to guests at a dinner, a talk she’s doubtless heard many times but in this close-up she feels all that promise has been cheated, seeding the discontent between them. Bardem is excellent too as the man who’s done everything right, is even an equal and present father, slowly realising the closed-off person he’s becoming.
With good support from Stephen Graham and Mark Gatiss as well as a surprise Hollywood cameo, Zeller creates the conditions where what you see on the surface isn’t all it seems. A tad overdramatic in its final chapter perhaps, this claustrophobic examination of bunker mentality, of the delusions that grow from money and wanting to hoard luxury reminds the characters and the viewer what really matters is far simpler.
Bunker is screening at the BFI London Film Festival 2026 from 7-18 October.
