Kathryn Bigelow returns with a nuclear procedural that plays the same eighteen minutes three times over. The first pass is as frightening as anything she has made; by the third, the structure is costing her tension she cannot spare. Worth your evening, and you will not sleep well.
Kathryn Bigelow has not made a film since Detroit in 2017, and A House of Dynamite returns to the mode of Zero Dark Thirty: people in rooms, deciding things on incomplete information, with the clock running. A ballistic missile is spotted rising over the Pacific. Nobody knows who fired it. Within minutes the screens agree on where it will land, and the people whose job it is to answer have eighteen minutes to do so. The film shows those eighteen minutes, then goes back and shows them twice more from other rooms. The first pass is as frightening as anything Bigelow has made. The third is not, and the gap between them is the film’s problem. It is still worth your evening.
The Situation Room belongs to Rebecca Ferguson, as Captain Olivia Walker, and she is the best thing here. She runs a watch floor of screens and headsets, and Ferguson plays a woman whose training holds her voice steady while her face gives everything away. Barry Ackroyd, who shot The Hurt Locker, keeps the camera loose and close and never lets it settle, so you read the watch floor the way Walker does, in glances. Kirk Baxter cuts between the rooms fast enough that the phone calls seem to overlap, and the effect is of a machine waking up faster than the people inside it.
The moment that got us was not the missile. It was a number. Somebody asks what the odds are that the interceptors will hit, and the answer, given flatly by a man who has known it for years, is roughly those of a coin toss. We felt sick, and we stayed sick for the rest of the first hour, because the film had shown us the machinery built to stop such a thing and then told us it might as well not be there. Jared Harris, as Secretary of Defense Reid Baker, takes the news with the face of a man doing sums he does not want the answer to, and it is the best acting in the picture.
Tracy Letts’s General Brady wants to shoot back and says so in short sentences. Gabriel Basso, as Deputy National Security Advisor Jake Baerington, plays the one man who seems to have read the briefing books, clever and out of his depth at once. Greta Lee, on a phone line as the analyst Ana Park, does more with a voice than Noah Oppenheim’s script gives her. Anthony Ramos, at the missile defence base in Alaska, has the loneliest job in the film. Idris Elba’s President arrives late, by design, and Elba plays him as a decent man asked a question with no decent answer. It is a good performance in a role that mostly asks him to listen.
The structure is where the film costs itself. Oppenheim divides the eighteen minutes in three and hands each third to a different set of rooms, and the idea is sound: the same phone call sounds different depending on which end you are holding. But the second pass repeats scenes we have already watched, and by the third we know when the screens will change and what the general will say when they do. The fear we felt at the start turned into waiting. Jeremy Hindle’s production design keeps the rooms distinct, low ceilings and wall-sized maps in Washington, hard white light in Alaska, and Volker Bertelmann’s score keeps a low pulse under all of it, but neither can make the third viewing of the same minute feel like the first.
Then there is the ending, which has divided critics and which we will not describe. Bigelow has decided not to give us what a thriller usually gives, and we think she is right. The trouble is not the decision but the twenty minutes before it, which drift when the film can least afford it. Sarah Edwards’s costumes, all lanyards and badges and one wrong tie, keep the procedure looking lived in even as the drama thins.
Against Bigelow’s own work, this is not The Hurt Locker or Zero Dark Thirty. The tension comes from the premise rather than the people, and Ferguson aside, nobody is on screen long enough to become more than their job. Most critics have been warmer than we are, and we see why: the first forty minutes are as good as this kind of film gets. The tagline is ‘Not if. When.’ Few films could get away with a line like that. This one does, mostly in its first act.
