Sometimes movies reach us in a place beyond mere assessment: you walk away from the thing you’ve just seen not really knowing if you’d call it good or bad, or even great, but you know something has shifted inside you. That’s the effect of A House of Dynamite, directed by Kathryn Bigelow and premiering at the Venice Film Festival. The picture is precise, potent, and ingeniously constructed. But even though it focuses on the nuts and bolts of how the United States government might respond to a nuclear attack, there’s something ghostly and unreal about it too. Without spelling anything out in detail, it lays bare all sorts of global realities we don’t want to think about. Who wants to contemplate the unthinkable? Bigelow has made a modern-day real-world horror movie that’s unsettling for all that it doesn’t show.
There are no heroes in A House of Dynamite, but there are no definable villains, either, which is what makes this film so unmooring. The premise is straightforward and sleek: a nuclear missile is headed for the American Midwest, but no one knows which country launched it. If it’s not intercepted, it will hit its target in roughly 20 minutes. The film unfolds within that time frame, its events relayed from multiple points of view, including that of a young major stationed in the Pacific (Anthony Ramos), a disillusioned deputy advisor who’s forced to fill shoes he’s not ready for (Gabriel Basso), a Secretary of Defense who can barely reckon with the reality of what’s unfolding before him (Jared Harris), and, finally, the President himself (Idris Elba), a man who, it’s signaled to us, is fairly new to the job when the crisis hits. Nearly every one of these people has a family or loved one at home. As they try to stave off impending catastrophe, they’re also making discreet, clipped phone calls to people they care about. If this is the beginning of the end of the world, they need to touch base, if only for a few seconds, with the people who matter in their world.
Ramos’ Major Daniel Gonzales and his crew notice the missile, launched from somewhere in the Pacific, and spring to action, hoping to intercept it. In Washington, Captain Olivia Walker (Rebecca Ferguson), gets his report and responds with concern but not alarm—the belief, at the beginning, is that somehow this is a misreading or a mistake. Harris’s Secretary of Defense Reid Baker eventually shows up on a video call, cantankerously alert but not yet panicked, though his demeanor shifts when he learns that the missile just may hit Chicago, where his daughter lives. Bits of information about each character are telegraphed economically: We learn that Basso’s deputy security advisor Jack Baerington is dissatisfied with his job, feeling his skills are underutilized, until he’s pressed into service to answer consequential questions for his boss, who’s traveling and can’t be reached. And for several seemingly interminable minutes, POTUS is absent, his video screen in the Situation Room a blank square. Where is he? The quiet bustle of the room heightens to a low-level buzz of stress. A cantankerous general, Tracy Letts’s Anthony Brady, braces himself for orders: Will the President decide to counterattack? And how will he know what to do, when no one knows who’s responsible?
As the minutes tick by, more urgent calls go out to various specialists and experts: Ana Park (Greta Lee), an authority on North Korean politics, is annoyed when her cellphone buzzes on her day off. (She’s spending it with her kid at a Battle of Gettysburg re-enactment.) A FEMA official, played by Moses Ingram’s Cathy Rogers, receives news that she’s going to be hustled to safety in a bunker—beyond that, she has no idea what’s going on, because no one has any clarity on the situation. The movie is divided into sections, each showing this unsettling turn of events—remember, it’s only 20 or so minutes of time—from a different character’s perspective. Lines of dialogue are repeated from section to section; sometimes we’ll see a character saying something we’d previously heard only as part of a phone call, and the context shifts slightly. A seemingly nondescript snippet of information—as when a character says, “One minute to intercept”—becomes more tense, not less, each time you hear it. It’s all part of a shifting mosaic that changes shape and tone from second to second.
A House of Dynamite is one of the most stressful viewing experiences I’ve had in years. It’s a movie with a seemingly endless number of moving parts, cut with diamond precision. (Kirk Baxter is the editor.) In researching the movie, screenwriter Noah Oppenheim—who was president of NBC News before he began writing for film—interviewed current and former military specialists and others who have spent decades preparing for a catastrophic nuclear event, even as the rest of us go about our day-to-day stuff. Ignorance is bliss, but how much of that can we afford?
Bigelow pulls the film together with the exactitude of a fighter pilot. It sometimes seems incomprehensible that this is only her 11th full-length feature film; she’s one of those filmmakers who chooses and executes her projects with care, and this one feels particularly urgent. In the years after the U.S. bombed Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Americans were haunted by the possibility of nuclear warfare. Our fears showed up in the movies, too, in Cold War dramas like Sidney Lumet’s 1964 Fail Safe or apocalyptic thrillers like Stanley Kramer’s 1959 On the Beach. Yet somehow, even though the chances of nuclear destruction have only increased in the decades since, we now think about it less. Bigelow wanted to make the film, she says in the movie’s press notes, as a way of reckoning with the reality that the world could end in the space of a few heartbeats: “Multiple nations possess enough nuclear weapons to end civilization within minutes, and yet there’s a kind of collective numbness, a quiet normalization of the unthinkable.” A House of Dynamite lays out one particularly terrifying possibility. What if you, your family, and your community were wiped out in a flash or, probably worse, left to survive in a scorched, barren world? And if the scenario of A House of Dynamite were to play out in real life, whom would you want at the helm of the government, making potentially world-ending decisions? Bigelow takes the unthinkable and puts it right in front of us. We can ignore the alarm if we want. But that doesn’t mean it’s not blasting.
The post Kathryn Bigelow’s A House of Dynamite Is Skillful, Stressful, and Urgent appeared first on TIME.
