Kathryn Bigelow’s movies aren’t here to make friends. She’s interested in the police and the military, and in the violence and systems that enable—or hinder—their work. Her latest, A House of Dynamite, offers a close look at the machinery of the United States government under the pressure-cooker threat of nuclear war. Someone has fired a warhead at the United States. We don’t know who; we just know that the missile is aimed somewhere in America’s heartland. The film follows the immediate aftermath of the discovery as her massive ensemble cast each work through the crisis and their reactions to it. Throughout the tension, Bigelow’s keeps drawing attention to the people caught in the gears. She’s interested in the places where the structure is cracking, where the humanity bleeds through.
The film is structured in a series of interlocking stories—Rebecca Ferguson as an officer overseeing the White House Situation Room, Jared Harris as the Secretary of Defense, Anthony Ramos as a major on duty at Ft. Greeley in Alaska, Idris Elba as the President, Greta Lee as an intelligence analyst, to name just a very few. We see the same event spanning about twenty-five minutes from what feels like a dozen different perspectives, each new layer adding additional detail and depth to the drama. Generals and admirals on a video call drop in and out, their screens going dark, their faces distracted; later, from another angle, we’ll learn why. Bigelow ramps up the tension by zeroing in on the characters’ anxiety, the moments of not knowing what’s going on when everyone else in the country is relying on them to make the decisions they’ve been trained to make.
The script—written by Joshua Oppenheim—is a stressful story; Bigelow renders it with a dispassionate eye, framing her characters with handheld camerawork that feels familiar under her direction (cinematographer Barry Ackroyd also shot Bigelow’s The Hurt Locker). The musical theme manifests itself as a perpetual question, ending on a high minor note with no resolution, the manifestation of the characters’ feelings onscreen. Bigelow’s interests lie primarily with digging at that tension, then cutting away to underline the fact that there are civilians out there who have no idea of the crisis unfolding.
Everyone in this film who’s been tasked with making a decision about the defense of the country has a loved one, a child, a partner, a spouse: someone else whose well-being they care about and who drives them to distraction. And everyone in charge of making decisions is simply another cog in the machine that was set in motion long before they gained their positions, constantly looking for someone else to step up, to make the call, to set things right again. There’s no setting anything right; disaster looms on the horizon, speeding toward the heartland every second. Bigelow wants us to ask why that is, and what we can do about it, but she, like the script, withholds her answers; a fine point becomes a blunt object instead. —Sarah Welch-Larson
★★☆☆
A House of Dynamite is now streaming on Netflix.