Kathryn Bigelow’s new film may not be horror, yet it is more frightening than most. Her first feature since Detroit arrives at Venice with the sting of a siren and the cool precision you would expect from the director of The Hurt Locker and Zero Dark Thirty. The set-up is brutally simple. One missile is launched at the United States. Less than twenty minutes to impact. Who fired it, and how should the country respond, as panic and protocol collide.
The first section had me pinned to my seat. Inside the Situation Room, everyday chatter freezes as screens light up with a blip angling toward the Midwest, then narrowing to Chicago. Rebecca Ferguson’s Capt. Olivia Walker feels the pressure rise beat by beat while Anthony Ramos’ Maj. Daniel Gonzalez and Jason Clarke’s Admiral Mark Miller trade optimism and grim math. Calls climb the chain. A shoot-down attempt is ordered. The clock will not slow. It is gripping, cleanly staged, and suffocating in the best way.
Bigelow and writer Noah Oppenheim then rewind to STRATCOM for part two, and finally to the President for part three. In theory this three-angle design should deepen the drama. In practice the film keeps replaying the same twenty minutes with different faces on the phone, which gradually drains momentum. The structural gambit becomes a frustration rather than an amplification. By the time Idris Elba’s President is helicoptered from a basketball game and briefed by Jonah Hauer-King’s straight-shooting officer, I felt the movie telling me what I already knew, not revealing what I did not. The mosaic clarifies procedure, but it rarely adds emotional or thematic layers that the first passage did not already convey.
Even with that caveat, the film’s plausibility is skin-crawling. The questions it poses feel uncomfortably current. If attribution is murky, do you risk escalation or accept unimaginable loss. Tracy Letts, as Gen. Anthony Brady, embodies that terrible calculus with flinty urgency. Jared Harris’ Defense Secretary tries to manage optics while privately unraveling. Gabriel Basso’s deputy is yanked from domestic calm and shoved under fluorescent lights. Across the board the performances feel lived-in rather than theatrical, and Ferguson in particular anchors the panic with steely focus and visible doubt.
The craft is immaculate. Barry Ackroyd’s handheld frames are crisp without showboating. Jeremy Hindle’s production design makes command centers feel functional, not fetishized. Kirk Baxter’s cutting ratchets the tempo as options dwindle. Paul N. J. Ottosson’s sound design turns data pings and distant rumble into dread. Bigelow still directs crisis like few others, privileging process, pressure, and the sickening lag between decision and consequence.
The film also sits in a lineage of nuclear cinema that ranges from Fail Safe and Dr. Strangelove to On the Beach. Bigelow is not chasing satire or melodrama. She is issuing a sober bulletin from the brink. On that level it works powerfully. I only wish the narrative engine did not stall as it loops through the same window of time three times. The first act had me on edge. By the midpoint the repetition started to pull me out.
Verdict. As a warning flare A House Of Dynamite is chillingly effective and painfully believable. As a piece of storytelling its triptych approach blunts some of its early force. Even so, the message lands with a thud in the gut. There is still time, brother, but the clock is loud.