Review: A House of Dynamite

Image courtesy of Netflix.

In case anyone needs to add more to their anxiety in our perilously fraught moment, Kathryn Bigelow's "A House of Dynamite" is hear to shatter your nerves and keep you up nights. Her latest film details how the United States might respond during an emergency involving nuclear weapons. You won't find any comfort here.

The picture is broken up into three parts, all of which basically show how a variety of characters react during a 19-minute window in which they find out that what appears to be a nuclear weapon has been launched and en route to a major American city. There are subtle hints as to what is going on in each of their lives - a man trying to reconnect with an estranged daughter, a man whose wife is pregnant, another who wants to pop the question, etc.

Other than that, we mostly observe these people in the moment. Some of them are top military brass, one is a FEMA call center worker, and another is the president of the United States (Idris Elba). All of the characters try to comfort themselves that the launched weapon isn't what they think it is, that the U.S. military will be able to shoot it down, or that it might end up being a dud, as some missiles can be.

Regardless, "A House of Dynamite" examines what happens when the experts are put to the test in a scenario that one describes as a "coin flip" in terms of how things might turn out. There's no guarantee that a response will have its intended effect. Even more chilling is the fact that no one seems to have any idea who fired the missile and, as a result, any retaliation could lead to an unnecessary war that - in this case - would result in nuclear annihilation.

Another of the film's unsettling concepts is how various individuals involved in the situation - a top military general played by Tracy Letts and a person in charge in the Situation Room (Rebecca Ferguson) - appear to be highly competent at their jobs, and yet even that is not enough to get the horrific scenario under control. No amount of competency might be enough in a Defcon 1 situation, and many of those trained to handle such a scenario fall apart when actually faced with it.

Bigelow has long been one of the best at delivering muscular military dramas - "The Hurt Locker" won her the Best Director Oscar and "Zero Dark Thirty" was one of my top 10 of the previous decade. Her previous film, "Detroit," was liked by me but received otherwise mixed reviews. "A House of Dynamite" is being hailed as a comeback.

This is a tense, very well made, and disturbingly timely picture. Two years ago, "Oppenheimer" told the story of how the nuclear age was born, but Bigelow's film presents a frighteningly real enactment of what it might look like if such an event landed on our shores. Anyone with nerves not yet shredded by the nightly news will likely not want to miss this engrossing and nerve-wracking picture.