‘Riveting’ US nuclear attack thriller is ‘more terrifying than most horror films’

The Hurt Locker director Kathryn Bigelow builds “excruciating tension” in a film about a nuclear missile headed for the US. It’s a characteristically authentic, “riveting” and “chilling” new drama.

A nuclear missile has been launched. Nobody knows who launched it, or whether any more might follow, but one thing is clear. Unless it is stopped, the missile will obliterate a major US city in less than 20 minutes. So what happens next? Most Hollywood films would bring in a handsome hero at this point, and he would be so superhumanly gifted that even if he couldn’t prevent the missile strike, he could certainly discover who was responsible and deliver swift retribution. But A House of Dynamite is directed by Kathryn Bigelow, who made the Oscar-winning The Hurt Locker (2008) and Zero Dark Thirty (2012), and once again she balances her knack for building excruciating tension with her devotion to deeply researched, no-nonsense military and political authenticity. The resulting drama, which premiered at the Venice Film Festival on Tuesday will be released on Netflix in October, is more riveting than most thrillers, and more terrifying than most horror films.

Scripted by Noah Oppenheim, the former president of NBC News, A House of Dynamite is split into three parts, each of which unfolds in more-or-less real time after an initial preamble. The first is largely set in the bustling, highly caffeinated White House Situation Room, where the senior duty officer (Rebecca Ferguson) and the senior director (Jason Clarke) are processing information as it comes in. Meanwhile, on a US military base in Alaska, a crew commander (Anthony Ramos) has the stressful task of launching the missiles that might be able to intercept the incoming one.

This section sets the film’s brisk and chilling tone. Bigelow and Oppenheim can’t avoid all of the old tropes of disaster movies and political thrillers – the captions giving each location its official acronym, the heart-tugging phone calls to conveniently estranged or pregnant loved ones – but there are no grandstanding speeches or floods of emotion, and no wisecracks to lighten the mood. The closest thing to a joke is the repeated early use of the phrase “Have a nice day” when we already know that the day will not be nice at all.

The missile’s potential impact gets nail-bitingly closer and closer, and then the film rewinds to show events from another perspective. This time, the main characters are two security advisors (Gabriel Basso, Greta Lee) who provide the top brass with their insights, and try to persuade people to take those insights seriously. Finally, a third section covers the same ticking-clock timeline again, as experienced by two senior politicians, the rattled secretary of defence (Jared Harris) and the jovial US president (Idris Elba). One minute, the president is shaking hands with some basketball-playing students; the next he is being bundled into a car and then a helicopter, and the nuclear “football”, or Presidential Emergency Satchel, is by his side.

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