The Bunker Game

I can't really give an honest review of the substance of the story as it moves rather slowly and struggled to hold my attention.

I do enjoy a good slow burn (You Should Have Left comes to mind - slow burn, great camerawork and the story keeps a good pace) but this one was just sort of stuck in second gear in my opinion.

I did find the camerawork, lighting and scenery quite enjoyable and that held my attention.

It's worth a watch if you can set aside the slow story and enjoy it on perhaps a more visceral level.

To me this movie seemed like part thriller, part tragedy tinged with scifi, and part something else, but I'm not sure what. I'm even not sure I get the whole thing, but I think what makes it worthwhile is the set, which is amazing and kept me watching, and the actors being top notch along with some interesting dialogue and the generally high quality production... everything very well done. It also felt a bit profound, as if wholly allegory, but went so many directions I can't say what the message was. Recommended if you don't mind wondering wtf a few times without always getting an answer.

The Bunker Game (2022) follows a group of people running a larping event in an underground bunker, when mysterious things keep happening, they decide to stop the event and investigate. This film had a very unique premise but it was just completely boring and lacked substance or any originality. I felt nothing after watching it, which is always a bad sign for me.

There were some decent colour palettes, but other than this, the cinematography was very mediocre. The focus shifts weren't well done and looked way too odd, and the flashing lights used were super annoying and distracting. However, to my surprise, the final shots were absolutely gorgeous. The end shots showed that the filmmakers had the ability so make something visually beautiful, it's just a shame they didn't utilise this until the last minute.

The score was definitely lacking, and I just felt like the sound design as a whole was missing something. I expected a film like this to have effective sound design in order to build up tension, but unfortunately it didn't.

The acting was decent, but this inevitably didn't matter as the characters were poorly written and had a serious lack of depth. Also, some scenes were very dialogue heavy which was a bad thing due to the dialogue dragged a lot.

The movie started off a bit messy, and took way too long to get going. There wasn't any tension built up, and I was over half way in when things started to happen. The pacing was very consistent with a lack of atmosphere, and the whole movie just felt incredibly bland.

I Realize this movie is only 95 minutes long but it seemed much much longer than that. The story seems so disjointed, and I really didn't get much time to care about any of the main characters. This setting for these LARPers is supposed to be haunted but the film isn't the least bit scary. The jump scares are lame, and my biggest problem is that these people are all willingly playing NAZI's in the LARP. I might not understand the whole LARPing community, but I know a bad movie when I see one.

The film did NOT know what it wanted to be. It started off as an intriguing story about LARPing that looked like it would become a mystery and/or a psychological thriller, but then it devolved into a really stupid ghost story. To top it off, there were superfluous villains to provide additional (stupid) plot twists. What an absolute WASTE of decent actors and a nice set!

Whoever was in charge of the story should be fired; this could have gone any number of interesting ways, but NOOO, it's all about messing with the audience. Either someone tried to copy aspects of various incompatible films, or committee "logic" was involved. Gad.

I give this three (3) stars. It's AT BEST an interesting failure.