A House of Dynamite

Rated R • Netflix

An intercontinental ballistic missile is heading toward the United States, presumably bringing with it a nuclear warhead that will vaporize a major urban center. That’s the situation in director Kathryn Bigelow’s political thriller A House of Dynamite.

The action in this 112-minute film takes place over a harrowing 20-or-so minutes—the time that elapses between the missile’s detection and its arrival at its destination. Bigelow, who won an Academy Award for the war movie The Hurt Locker (2008), lets the action unfold in three acts that repeat these tense minutes from three different perspectives. Each time the events repeat the audience becomes more intimately acquainted with the emotional toll the crisis exacts.

The film begins in the White House Situation Room, where Olivia Walker (Rebecca Ferguson) monitors world events. She starts her shift distracted because her young son’s fever has spiked. Within minutes she’s concerned her son’s country won’t exist by the end of the day. From the situation room, Walker rounds up the secretary of defense, Strategic Command, the NSA, and eventually the president, who’s out making goodwill appearances when the threat is detected.

Two urgent questions must be answered as the minutes to impact count down. First, is the U.S. military capable of stopping the missile? Second, what should be the government’s response to the attack?

This second question is especially vexing because surveillance systems didn’t register who launched the missile. All that’s known is it came from somewhere in the Pacific. Is it the North Koreans? The Russians? The Chinese? How can the president order a counterstrike if he’s not positive who’s responsible? But would a lack of response signal weakness to our enemies and invite more attacks? Maybe the best course of action would be to launch our own nukes to neutralize all three countries’ nuclear capabilities. But an attack like that would escalate the crisis and invite the targets to immediately launch their entire arsenals. As one character says, the options are “surrender or suicide.”

Over the last 40 years, we’ve lulled ourselves into viewing nuclear war as unthinkable. A House of Dynamite is an unsettling movie because it shows just how thinkable the unthinkable really is. We might have plans and contingencies, but if someone really did launch a nuke, world leaders would have less than half an hour to respond.

The film’s characters show a range of reactions. Some advocate immediately launching a global war. Some caution that the stakes are too high and that the U.S. shouldn’t respond at all. Some focus on making sure their loved ones are far from any urban centers.

The president is one of the last people to find out about the crisis, but he’s the only one who can determine the response. The audience feels the agony of his responsibility.

A House of Dynamite—rated R for language—isn’t a feel-good movie. It’s a reminder that no one wins in a nuclear war. We’ve used that fact to comfort ourselves, believing that since a nuclear war can have no winner, no one would want to start one. But the film offers a relevant caveat: Someone who’s already losing the game might decide that he would prefer a world without any winners. It’s a sobering and scary thought.