A House of Dynamite is terrifyingly plausible

The film counts down in real time, from three different overlapping perspectives, as military officials, politicians and intelligence officers scramble to attribute the attack and to decide on an appropriate response. There will be no winners.

Noah Oppenheim’s taut, sinewy screenplay neatly packages detailed background information and exposition in the form of frazzled, sweat-drenched security briefings. But Bigelow understands that the magnitude of this geopolitical crisis is too overwhelming for average cinema audiences to wrap their heads around. She breaks down the inconceivable into small, heartbreaking details: the toddler’s plastic dinosaur that found its way into the pocket of his high-powered mother’s blazer; the blithe message on a bus display board encouraging passengers to “Have a nice day”; the giddy children at a Gettysburg re-enactment, hopped up on popping muskets and cannon fire and a simpler, more honourable kind of warfare.

We start to comprehend the fragility of the lives we take for granted. And we grasp the seriousness of events in the stricken expressions on the faces of the highly trained White House staff as each new piece of information filters through.

The introduction to key characters comes via a glimpse of relatable moments of normalcy before everything changes for ever. Capt Olivia Walker (Rebecca Ferguson, excellent), a ranking officer in the White House situation room, is up early with her cranky little boy, distracting him from his fever with a few circuits of his train set. Jake Baerington (Gabriel Basso), the ambitious deputy national security adviser, shares a car to work with his heavily pregnant wife and frets about his stymied career progression. And Maj Daniel Gonzalez (Anthony Ramos), at a US military station in Fort Greely, Alaska, fights with his wife on the phone then snaps at his colleague for spilling Doritos over his work station.

When the missile is first caught on radar, the White House staff are not unduly alarmed. They are, after all, accustomed to a fair amount of sabre-rattling from various hostile regimes (North Korea is at the top of the list of likely culprits), and the primary concern is the amount of paperwork rather than an impending nuclear Armageddon. But the film’s score, by Volker Bertelmann, sounds a warning. It’s a thunderous work from the German composer, who won an Oscar in 2023 for Edward Berger’s All Quiet on the Western Front and is almost certainly guaranteed a nomination for this. Ominous, rumbling bass notes shake the very foundations of the cinema; sawing strings inject stabbing notes of panic.

A high-calibre ensemble cast that mixes familiar character actors – Jared Harris plays the secretary of defence; Tracy Letts is a bullish general – with a smattering of newer faces is impressive throughout. There is no showboating or grandstanding; the drama plays out in tiny, intimate moments: the twitch of Ferguson’s mouth as she tries not to cry; the frantic multitasking of Greta Lee’s intelligence expert, juggling childcare with a call from the president (Idris Elba). Even the US leader is struggling: he’s new in the job, bone-tired and ill-prepared to make a decision that, according to one adviser, boils down to “surrender or suicide”.

Brisk camerawork and propulsive editing contribute to the sense of urgency that drives the picture; there’s no flab whatsoever here. Bigelow, whose previous features include Zero Dark Thirty and 2010 best picture Oscar winner The Hurt Locker, is a director whose work carries the DNA of the meaty, serious-minded American political thrillers of the 1970s. An heir to the legacy of film-makers such as Alan J Pakula, she makes muscular, grownup cinema about subjects that matter. There’s a sickening plausibility to the horror that unfolds in A House of Dynamite. It’s one of the most terrifying films of the year.

Photograph by Netflix