A House of Dynamite: a ‘nail-biting’ nuclear-strike thriller

Kathryn Bigelow’s new film, scripted by Noah Oppenheim, confronts a truly terrifying possibility, said Peter Bradshaw in The Guardian: “that a nuclear war could or rather will start with no one knowing who started it or who ended it”.

It imagines a scenario in which a nuke has been launched from the Pacific and is heading for Chicago. Its predicted impact time is just 19 minutes. Blindsided, the US military at various bases scrambles to try to intercept the missile and figure out who launched it and how best to respond. They could launch a counterstrike – but that decision, which only the president (Idris Elba) has the authority to make, is very much complicated by the fact that, although North Korea is a suspect, they don’t know for certain who the enemy here is.

The action takes place mainly within this crucial 19 minutes, but to build tension and stretch out the running time, Bigelow examines the nail-biting countdown from three perspectives, said David Sexton in The New Statesman.

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In the first, we follow Captain Olivia Walker (Rebecca Ferguson), a mother with a sick child at home who finds herself in charge of the White House Situation Room on this terrible day; the second is set at US Strategic Command, where a bullish general (Tracy Letts) is urging a counterstrike. These sections are fast-paced and tense; but it all gets a bit slack in the third, when we see the unfolding crisis from the perspective of the president, who comes across as unconvincing and clownish.

Bigelow allows herself the odd indulgence, said Danny Leigh in the Financial Times, but she is “a virtuoso talent”. Her film is a highly effective “symphony of dread” – which creates a catch: “I don’t remember the last time I saw a film this formally brilliant that I also wanted to stop.”