A House of Dynamite review: Kathryn Bigelow’s white-knuckle thriller will make your heart race

When was the last time Kathryn Bigelow coddled her audience?

The American filmmaker is not interested in making things nice and comfortable. She wants her viewers to be confronted with the realities of the world, whether that’s war, racism or government-sanctioned torture.

Those things are happening, and we can’t begin to process and deal with it unless we accept that they’re real.

A House of Dynamite is the first film in two decades Bigelow has made that isn’t drawn from past events. Instead, she’s warning us of what could come, and hopes that this piece of speculative fiction will act as a cautionary tale.

The film portrays what could happen if a nuclear weapon is fired from a submarine in the Pacific corridor towards continental United States, and how the chain of command would respond in the 18 minutes it takes for it to strike a major city.

Because of that time crunch, A House of Dynamite is incredibly stressful to watch, and that’s why you should see it in a cinema over the next two weeks instead of waiting for its streaming release on Netflix.

The confined space of a theatre adds another layer to the viewing. Like the characters on screen, you are also given no reprieve, no moment to pause and walk away. The train is going full-speed and you are forced to stay on the ride.

Your pulse will quicken, your knuckles will whiten, and you will consider the prospect of nuclear annihilation as more likely than before the viewing. Maybe ignorance is bliss, but it doesn’t change the reality.

A House of Dynamite tells its story in triptych in a Rashomon-style approach that resets the timeline at the beginning of each part, and told from the perspective of different characters.

Every section starts on the morning of the attack as you follow the characters through their regular routine until the moment the missile is launched, and then it unfolds in real-time, each second of those 18 minutes ticking down, sometimes literally on screen.

There’s the military base in Alaska, and the team (including Anthony Ramos) which first clocks the missile launch, and the Situation Room in the White House, where Olivia Walker (Rebecca Ferguson, who gave the most affecting performance in an impressive cast) and Mark Miller (Jason Clarke) coordinate all the communications chaos including calls between the US and Russia.

There’s the head of strategic communications, General Anthony Brody (Tracy Letts), who is on the Zoom call with the Secretary of Defence (Jared Harris), the deputy National Security Advisor Jake Baerington (Gabriel Basso) and the President (Idris Elba), who appears only as a voice in the first two sections.

Other characters include a NSA expert (Greta Lee), a FEMA official (Moses Ingram), the lieutenant (Jonah Hauer-King) who accompanies the President with the nuclear launch codes, and the First Lady (Renee Elise Goldsberry).

It’s an ensemble cast in the truest sense because every actor is a piece in the puzzle in the same way that each of the roles they play, and their real-life counterparts, have a specific function in the event of a nuclear attack.

Everything everyone does is to serve the only person empowered to make any decisions, the President. Can you evacuate, can you warn, and more importantly, do you retaliate, and against whom when you don’t know who fired the shot?

Bigelow and screenwriter Noah Oppenheim consulted widely and deeply with the people whose jobs are to respond in any real-world scenarios, and A House of Dynamite follows the director’s signature mix cinematic and documentary style filmmaking.

The result is a gripping and anxiety-inducing film that feels urgent and immediate, as if it could all easily happen.

It hasn’t yet, and Bigelow wants everyone to ask the questions and provoke the actions to ensure it doesn’t.

Rating: 4/5

A House of Dynamite is in cinemas now