A London realtor would likely describe the handsome East End home of Miguel and Sofia Moreno as a Tardis. Its quaint, aged Victorian exterior belies the vast modernist construction within: all tall, clean planes of concrete, timber and glass over multiple split levels, leading out to a compact but exquisitely landscaped walled garden that the same realtor might call an urban sanctuary. Not that anybody ever really goes out there, save for the Morenos’ gorgeous, slate-gray Abyssinian cat Blue; life is busy for this upscale Spanish expat family, and their combined professional and personal interests — architecture, books, their phones, their things — tend to keep them indoors. In Florian Zeller‘s compelling new film “Bunker,” this enviable house isn’t the secure structure of the title, but it also kind of is; the Morenos’ lives are turned so inward, they can’t see how locked-down they really are.
The insular existence and myopic outlook of the moneyed classes in these times of societal division and virtual connection are not exactly fresh themes for a dramatist of Zeller’s stature: “Bunker” certainly flirts with obviousness as it measures the pitfalls of this family’s privilege against the more extreme social self-isolation of the billionaire set, and invites us to consider how much difference there is between them. Its visual metaphors are not subtle; its verbal unpacking of them, even less so. But the film gets its hooks in you; even when it feels familiar, it usually feels true. And that’s because Zeller’s words are often so well-chosen and well-turned, and sound especially good in the mouths of Javier Bardem and Penélope Cruz, two actors who can find seams of meaning and feeling in far more pedestrian dialogue.
