Kathryn Bigelow’s nuclear-showdown thriller A House of Dynamite is a hyperrealistic political procedural, shot with a documentary-style hand-held camera that embeds the increasingly tense viewer in the situation rooms and military outposts and presidential helicopters where the action unfolds. Yet the world in which this explicitly present-day story takes place can sometimes feel oddly retro, as though Bigelow were transporting us back to an age when imagining doomsday scenarios at least came with the comforting assumption that the government officials whose job it is to prevent the worst from happening were all, at some basic level, competent and sane enough to agree on what the worst would be.
Every character in A House of Dynamite seems to feel the immense moral and historical weight of the choices that have been suddenly thrust upon them, from the overwhelmed and indecisive but fundamentally decent president (Idris Elba), to the wearily pragmatic general serving as his senior military adviser (Tracy Letts), all the way down to the soldier at a remote post in the Pacific (Anthony Ramos) whose team first spots a nuclear missile of unknown origin bound for the American Midwest.
As these rattled but devoted public servants keep reminding one another, they trained for this. The script, by Noah Oppenheim, who has worked as a producer of television news as well as a screenwriter, steers clear of creating heroes and villains—an admirably fair-minded approach, but one that nonetheless ends up misrepresenting a key feature of contemporary American reality, which is that, should a real-life scenario like the one in this movie present itself, we would be in the hands of Pete Hegseth, Stephen Miller, and Donald Trump.
The script for that movie might wind up veering too close to the genre of comic horror to remain in Kathryn Bigelow’s wheelhouse (though she did direct the eerily dystopian sci-fi fantasy Strange Days). Instead, Bigelow turns the ever-looming possibility of a DEFCON 1 nuclear emergency into the premise for a nail-biting thriller that’s also an ingenious puzzle box. A House of Dynamite’s status as a cautionary tale also places it in the tradition of Cold War–era dramas like Fail Safe and The Day After, films that tried to look the reality of mutual assured destruction in the face without offering the terrified viewer much by way of comfort or catharsis. Like them, A House of Dynamite—which opens in theaters this Friday before streaming on Netflix on Oct. 24—is a feel-bad movie, but a precise and well-constructed one, with a capable and charismatic ensemble cast that delivers the script’s grim message with many not-unpleasurable jolts of adrenaline.
A House of Dynamite’s most unusual and effective formal choice is its temporal structure, with three chapters that all take place over roughly the same 18-minute time frame, in between the realization that the missile is incoming and its expected moment of impact. It isn’t quite accurate to say that these chapters unfold from three different points of view, since they all take a similarly neutral perspective on the unfolding events. Rather, each section lets us see the same 18 minutes in a different location, as emerging military intelligence on the ground gets relayed to a high-security videoconference meeting of the president and his chief advisers.
The first of what will turn out to be a lineup of short-term protagonists is Olivia Walker (Rebecca Ferguson), a senior Situation Room officer whose worst problem when we initially meet her is that her toddler son has been up all night with a fever. As the sun comes up, she leaves the child with her partner and heads off for a routine shift. Her first response on seeing reports about the inbound missile is that it must be a false alarm or some kind of technical glitch. As it becomes clear that impact is imminent, and that the missile’s target is a major American city, the U.S. government is suddenly confronted with what appears to be the beginning of global nuclear war. “This is insanity,” says the commander in chief as the binder listing his retaliation options is placed in his hands. “No, Mr. President,” says Letts’ Gen. Brady. “This is reality.”
A second chapter follows the high-stress morning of Jake Baerington (Gabriel Basso), a junior national security adviser who happens to be filling in for his out-of-pocket boss on this of all days. Finally, in the last section, we relive those anxious 18 minutes in the company of the president, who in previous chapters appeared only as a voice in a black box on the video call. All three chapters include visits to the remote military-intelligence site where Ramos’ Maj. Gonzalez is dealing with a day that started with a long-distance breakup and has progressed downhill to impending nuclear war.
These three main storylines are nested so that each chapter reveals clues to what happened off-screen in the one before, as throwaway snippets of dialogue in one segment become pivotal exchanges in the next. Meanwhile, the bureaucrats’ emotional responses to the horrific dilemma they find themselves in are sketched in brief but effective character beats, often involving calls to loved ones. The secretary of defense (a moving Jared Harris) calls his semi-estranged daughter (Kaitlyn Dever), unsure how or whether to tell her it will likely be their last conversation. Ferguson’s Olivia, who presents herself in the Situation Room as an unflappable professional, finally starts to crack as she orders her husband to put their son in the car and drive as far as they can get from any urban center. A House of Dynamite’s brisk 112-minute run time barrels toward what looks like an inevitably catastrophic conclusion, yet the film keeps surprising you right up to the end. That doesn’t mean that everything about the film’s twist-packed final moments works, but I can’t say more without, so to speak, defusing the suspense.
Zero Dark Thirty, Bigelow’s 2012 drama about the hunt for Osama bin Laden, was accused by some critics of hewing too credulously to the official account of that operation and thereby telling a story that implicitly justified the U.S. government’s use of torture in the aftermath of the Sept. 11 attacks. To me, that view is complicated by the chilly distance Zero Dark Thirty keeps from its subject, along with an ending that suggests that Jessica Chastain’s single-minded CIA agent, like the country she’s sworn to defend, may have been irreparably damaged by the choices she’s made. A House of Dynamite’s relationship to its contemporary political reality seems less complicated than Zero Dark Thirty’s: By choosing to set her imagined Armageddon against the backdrop of a functional administration rather than [waves hands vaguely toward Washington], Bigelow reminds us that electoral politics are no solution to the systemic madness that is global nuclear proliferation. Even if we had a president like Elba’s unnamed but vaguely Obama-coded POTUS (he plays basketball with teens at a charity event and cannily deploys his considerable personal charm), and even if everyone in the chain of command were as well prepared and committed to their jobs as this movie’s qualified but helpless protagonists, an unforeseeable nuclear attack could set the entire command structure on its heels and, not to get dramatic about it, set off the apocalypse.
Occasionally, A House of Dynamite, for all its sleek construction and swift pacing, feels like a callback to Paul Greengrass’ purposely chaotic thrillers of the 2000s, filmed in jumpy hand-held fashion and obsessed with the inner workings of political and military bureaucracy. (Acronyms! So very many unmemorable acronyms!) But A House of Dynamite isn’t looking to revive past cinematic styles any more than it wants to re-create real-life events. Instead it seems meant to be a kind of national-security Aesop’s fable, a fictional stress test that makes the muddy moral waters of our everyday life look starkly, scarily clear.