The Bunker Game

No pun intended - as in lurking around or whatever else you may read from it ... well maybe a bit intended ... or a lot. Like when you plan role playing games, but you know not everything will go according to plan. That all being said and while the actors really do do their best (is that grammatically correct?), the movie has quite a few flaws.

I am not even sure you have to like role playing games to be into this - but it does help for sure. You have to love movies to even consider watching this of course. Because this low budget effort is really only for certain people ... it looks good for sure, but that is to be expected from any movie that is being made, with technology having evolved. Costumes and sets are quite nice too though - especially for a low budget movie.

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.

(No spoiler)The movie has SOME redeeming qualities. The beginning is semi interesting? Makes you wonder what will happen next, but that quickly devolves. It has so many weird, unnecessary plot points. The pacing is super bizarre. Each character makes you feel like they were going for a different movie with each of them.

In the end the movie got to be so boring and drawn out I would fast forward through some of the more pointless scenes. There's a weird nude scene, just because I guess? Lot of scenes that were, "meant" to add to the ambience or suspense and manages to do neither.

For the story itself it's just bad. There's no other way around it. The movie doesn't know what it's trying to say, because it ends up saying a lot of nothing. The individual stories feel super bland and pointless, while the main plot somehow manages to be worse?

It boils down to creepy horror movie trope executed HORRIBLY to the point where the movie was somehow creepier before you got to the tropey horror execution.

Then it tells you nazis are bad, and that incels are also bad. While this is true. It offers nothing extra to say for either of these.

The point they try to make about female autonomy was also done poorly in my opinion. They make the main character brave and independent, which is good. They, however undo a lot of this by making her personality revolve around a guy and having a kid.

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 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.