A House of Dynamite: Kathryn Bigelow’s riveting doomsday thriller

A House of Dynamite falls neatly into the old Cold War genre of doomsday tick-tockers such as Fail Safe, its satiric cousin Dr. Strangelove and Seven Days in May (all three films are from 1964), with one fresh wrinkle: the action unfolds in real time over about 35 minutes and is replayed three times from different vantage points.

Rebecca Ferguson as Captain Olivia Walker gives one of the standout performances in A House of Dynamite. Photo / Eros Hoagland, Netflix

Our first view is from the Army base in Alaska and the White House operations suite known as the Situation Room. Then we’re inside the higher levels of top Pentagon brass and National Security Council (NSC) advisers and, finally, within the inner sanctum of the US President, unnamed but played by a charismatic Idris Elba. (Since the actor never did get around to playing James Bond, I guess this is the next best thing.)

Each replay ends at a critical juncture of decision, and if the notion of sitting through the potential end of the world three times over sounds wearying, the suppleness of the writing and a scrupulously researched sense of verisimilitude keep a viewer on the edge of their seat.

We really do feel like we’re there, and under all the jargon and by-the-book procedure is an intensely relatable human drama: the realisation among professionals who have practised for this exact moment that this isn’t a drill. At which point the professionalism begins to crumble as they contemplate a cataclysm about to engulf billions of strangers and everyone they love.

It’s to the cast’s credit that they keep us on that fulcrum of duty and humanity. Standouts include Rebecca Ferguson as the Situation Room senior officer, confronted with the death of civilisation while her husband takes their toddler to the paediatrician; Tracy Letts, the playwright turned invaluable character actor, as a general at the US Strategic Command pushing for retaliation (but against whom?); Gabriel Basso (Hillbilly Elegy) as a raw young NSC deputy adviser pressed into trying to convince the Russians to stand down; and Jared Harris (Mad Men, Chernobyl) as the Secretary of Defence, blandly circumspect on the outside and increasingly torn up on the inside.

Anthony Ramos as Major Daniel Gonzalez as the action unfolds in real time in A House of Dynamite. Photo / Eros Hoagland, Netflix

In perhaps the most unusual role, Jonah Hauer-King plays a minor figure who’s suddenly the second most important person in the world: the ramrod-stiff military aide assigned to accompany the President everywhere with the codes for a nuclear launch. He’s the man with the “football” and in the final act, he, too, becomes human – and then an almost otherworldly bulwark for the President to lean on.

Not that it does him or any of us any good. A House of Dynamite asks each member of the audience to confront the same question facing Elba’s increasingly despairing commander in chief: what would you do? Would you push the button that destroys everything, or would you risk letting one US metropolis and 20 million people take an unimaginable, unavenged hit in the interests of planetary survival? The choice, in the words of Basso’s NSC adviser, is between “surrender or suicide”. But it’s still a choice.

The movie is riveting – reductive in structure, programmatic in its concerns but as epic in scope as a story can be that takes place over a single half hour. As we’ve come to expect with this director, A House of Dynamite is itself an act of professionalism, from the calmly ruthless editing by Kirk Baxter to Volker Bertelmann’s ominous score to the way the many pieces of the film’s narrative puzzle snap together.

Bigelow’s style can sometimes feel bloodless: her previous movie was 2017’s Detroit, about the 1967 riots in that city, and, for all the immediacy of its violence, it was a curiously remote film – a thesis hiding behind a thriller. By contrast, there’s only one on-screen casualty in A House of Dynamite – and it’s absolutely shocking if nearly abstract in the playing – but you feel the mass suffering waiting in the wings with barely contained horror.

For all that, the director has made a drama of people doing their jobs with preparation and skill, experience and forethought, and if none of that may be able to save their skins, at least they’re doing their best. Intentionally or not, that idea – “their best”, what we want those words to mean in the people who run and safeguard our country, what a country looks like that replaces “best” and “most capable” with “impulsive”, “ideological”, “most loyal” – runs like an unforgiving rebuke under A House of Dynamite and provides it with an extra note of mournfulness. Somewhere in the basement of this movie lurks a question that certainly is of the moment: if we want the planet to survive, shouldn’t we first make sure the country does?

Three and a half stars.

A House of Dynamite is in NZ cinemas now and on Netflix from October 24.