A House of Dynamite Is Tension, Distilled
Kathryn Bigelow makes the nuclear apocalypse real in a nerve-wracking political thriller.
What would happen if nuclear war broke out? It’s a terrifying hypothetical that has been explored by Hollywood for decades, since the threat of nuclear apocalypse became a dreadful prospect. Much of the cinematic focus has been on the race to prevent it, or on the apocalyptic aftermath, or on the rich metaphors that it inspires. But few movies have been able to capture what it’s like to be on the cusp of nuclear armageddon with the same level of nerve-shredding intensity as Kathryn Bigelow’s tense new thriller, A House of Dynamite.
Written by Noah Oppenheim, Bigelow’s first feature in eight years is as provocative and unpredictable as you’d expect from the Oscar-winning director of The Hurt Locker and Zero Dark Thirty. Told in an anthological, Rashomon-style structure, A House of Dynamite follows several groups of low and high-ranking officials on the day that the U.S. government identifies an unidentified Intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM) heading straight for the continental United States. It begins with a military base in Alaska, which quickly alerts the White House Situation Room, headed by Admiral Mark Miller (Jason Clarke) and Captain Olivia Walker (Rebecca Ferguson). All the big guns — including Secretary of Defense Reid Miller (Jared Harris), STRATCOM General Anthony Brody (Tracy Letts) — are gathered in a Zoom where they breathlessly watch the trajectory of the missile get closer to Chicago. The only person who can’t be found immediately is the President (Idris Elba), who joins with 18 minutes to spare before the missile makes landfall, and is faced with a terrible decision: to retaliate, or not to retaliate.
Tracy Letts’ war hawk General Anthony Brody leads STRATCOM.
The premise of A House of Dynamite is nothing new; there’s practically a whole genre of Cold War-era political thrillers that follow the same story. In fact, it’s practically a remake of Sidney Lumet’s 1964 film Fail Safe, right down to the game of ethical chicken on whether to order a retaliatory nuclear strike. But it’s Bigelow and Oppenheim’s unique three-act structure of the film, and the deliberate withholding of catharsis at the end of each chapter, that propels A House of Dynamite to new heights.
The structure of A House of Dynamite, divided into three separate chapters, is fairly straightforward: each chapter is set in relatively the same time frame, but shrinks with each succeeding chapter, until the characters — and audience, by extension — are thrust into that rapidly diminishing 18-minute window. It’s Rashomon by way of 24, but despite the somewhat gimmicky structure, A House of Dynamite is well-crafted enough for you not to care. Bigelow, who was always a strong, assured director, showcases a kind of pinpoint-precision filmmaking that makes every statistic blown up wide on a screen feel monumental, and every tick of the countdown clock feel like a fresh stab in the chest. The amount of despair that she and cinematographer Barry Ackroyd, who keeps the handheld approach from being too shaky, manage to eke out of a sign changing from DEFCON 2 to DEFCON 1, is stupendous. Many contemporary directors struggle with making a screen look compelling, but Bigelow won’t let you look away.
Rebecca Ferguson is the standout of an already-impressive cast.
The only issue with A House of Dynamite’s novel structure is that it doesn’t leave much room for anything other than tension. The characters mostly serve to be moved around by the plot or to move other characters around. But while it’s easy to admire the chess match-like storytelling of A House of Dynamite, it’s also easy to be left a little cold by it. The film only has time for the most baseline characterizations — this character has a fiancé, this one has a pregnant wife, this one has a husband and two kids. So it’s left to the actors, who make up an impressive ensemble, to give them life. A few characters throw some surprising wrenches into the plot, like Gabriel Basso’s Deputy NSA Advisor Jake Baerington, who has to step in for his boss and brief the president while jogging through the White House grounds. But Rebecca Ferguson is far and away the most successful at turning her character into a flesh-and-blood human, truly selling the stoic panic turned to despair in the face of certain doom. Right behind her is Jared Harris, who delivers a quietly desperate turn as one of the few officials with something truly personal to lose.
While Bigelow ultimately crafts an exercise in relentless tension that’s more immersive than insightful, it’s undeniably effective. It’s more about the visceral, propulsive feeling of being swept up in the last day before nuclear armageddon than it is about the why or the how. It’s about how your nerves feel like they’re about to wither to a crisp with each ticking clock, or how you have to remember to breathe, or else you’ll pass out from the suspense.
Elba’s nameless President, given a terrible decision.
But there’s a degree of nihilism to Bigelow’s thought exercise that reveals more to A House of Dynamite’s seemingly slight story: The characters are all absurdly competent, and they all do the right things. There’s almost a wide-eyed optimism to the way that all these government officials and officers act under duress. But even with all the best that they can throw at the situation, it’s not enough. It’s as if Bigelow were to say that nuclear warfare is inevitable, even if we never do find out where the missile came from, or whether the President chooses to retaliate. Humanity can prove itself to be the best that it can be, but the mere existence of these nuclear arsenals might just doom us all.
