A House of Dynamite

Kathryn Bigelow returns to her preoccupation with contemporary American politics in this adroit, taut thriller about a rogue nuclear weapon launched at the US.

Juggling a young family and high-pressure job, Captain Olivia Walker (Rebecca Ferguson: Dune, Silo) is the officer in charge in the White House Situation Room when a single, unattributed missile is launched. This sparks a race to determine who is responsible and how the President of the United States (Idris Elba) should respond.

A gluttony of characters we know all too well from the real world scramble to make sense of the incident, as the Academy Award-winning director offers us alarming insights into the vulnerabilities of the modern military-industrial complex. This provoked a strong response from the Pentagon, and a striking rebuttal from Bigelow who insisted, “I just state the truth.”

Writer Noah Oppenheim used his experience covering politics and foreign affairs as a journalist to layer the story from three angles that suddenly converge towards the film’s ending, one of the most talked about and polarising in modern cinema history.