Humans have always been skilled at the denial of death. We would have struggled to build cathedrals or write medieval epics without it. Over the past 40 years or so that tendency has taken on a puzzling capacity to push the threat of nuclear war into the mental shadows. Familiarity has bred not contempt but a complacent forgetting.
Kathryn Bigelow’s hugely stressful new film is here to remind us that we are at no less at risk of mass annihilation than were those watching Fail Safe in 1964 or Threads in 1984.
As was the case in the earlier of those films, A House of Dynamite has much to do with the high-level American response to an imminent attack. We repeatedly run through the last 20 minutes before expected detonation from several, equally anxious perspectives: Rebecca Ferguson as a senior communications officer, Gabriel Basso as deputy national security adviser, Tracy Letts as a bellicose general, Greta Lee as the government’s Korean specialist and, finally, Idris Elba as an insecure president.
We get some connection with the wider world through (slightly clunky) cuts to the participants’ unaware family, but, like so much of the best Bigelow, this is chiefly a film about men and women at work.
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Their day starts with what initially seems no more than a minor irritation. A missile has been launched somewhere in the Pacific and is headed east. This is, it seems, not an unusual event, and Captain Olivia Walker (Ferguson) barely takes a breath before initiating the usual procedures. It is surely some sort of test. The projectile will splash harmlessly into the sea. A few minutes later analysts conclude that the weapon looks to be heading for the American Midwest. Chicago is identified as a likely target.
The screenplay, written and rigorously researched by the former journalist Noah Oppenheim, has no good news for us. None at all. The chances of knocking out this one missile are modest and, should dozens follow, those defences will be useless. “It’s like trying to hit a bullet with a bullet,” Basso’s character memorably remarks.
Should the missile pass through that narrow window of opportunity, the president must choose between a shortlist of differently appalling responses. Kill hundreds of millions? Sit back and wait? The dilemma is neatly summarised as “surrender or suicide”. The officials don’t even know who the enemy is. The Russians seem to be mobilising, but North Korea looks like a more likely antagonist.
All this is cogently laid out in taut, utilitarian dialogue. The structure allows questions to be posed in the first run-through and then answered in a second or third retread from a different perspective. President Elba – we don’t learn the character’s name – encountering the news at a school event in the style of George Bush on 9/11, is convincing as a man answering questions no man should ever be asked.
Can something so depressing and nerve-racking count as entertainment? That is a question Bigelow has answered affirmatively in films such as The Hurt Locker and Zero Dark Thirty. Coaching coiled performances from a strong cast, she uses (counterintuitively?) our increasing familiarity with the plot to build the accumulating tension. The second time we hear about the almost certainly harmless missile, we are on alert for the realisation that it’s not heading where they think. Volker Bertelmann’s ratcheting score increases the sense that decades of finger-crossing may soon end in the worst imaginable fashion.
Many will have issues with the depiction of a largely benevolent military and political hierarchy. Some will worry about the necessarily terse summaries of North Korean and Russian polities. Almost everybody will shiver at the realisation that when a response to nuclear attack is required it is too late for any to be effective.
In cinemas from Friday, October 3rd, and on Netflix from Friday, October 24th
