“I always thought just being ready is the point,” Idris Elba says in the new trailer for Kathryn Bigelow’s A HOUSE OF DYNAMITE. “It keeps people in check, keeps the world straight. If they see how prepared we are, no one starts a nuclear war.”
That isn’t how things turn out in A HOUSE OF DYNAMITE. As the trailer continues, we see an intercontinental ballistic missile heading for the United States, and a star-studded cast including Elba, Rebecca Ferguson, and Jason Clarke scrambling to respond. “These are dedicated professionals at the highest level of government being called on to make impossible decisions in the most extreme circumstances imaginable, which is almost scarier in a way,” Bigelow tells Netflix.
The new film from the Academy Award–winning director of The Hurt Locker is a global thriller with a meticulous attention to detail, bringing audiences into the halls of power as a nuclear crisis unfolds. “We invite the audience into the room,” Bigelow said at a press conference following the film’s Venice Film Festival premiere. “And then, hopefully, it’s an invitation to decide what to do about all these weapons in a situation like this. What would we do? What would I do?”
The film leaves the identity of the enemy ambiguous, instead focusing on the shock waves that rattle through the American government in response. “I wanted the view of the film to be trained inward, not outward, and for the audience to lean into the ambiguity at the heart of the nuclear debate: How can we call this defense when the outcome could well be total destruction?” Bigelow says. “The antagonist is the system we’ve built to essentially end the world on a hair trigger.”
A HOUSE OF DYNAMITE serves as the third entry in what Bigelow considers an unofficial trilogy alongside The Hurt Locker and Zero Dark Thirty, both of which are likewise films about the military-industrial complex. They all started from a similar instinct: curiosity. “That’s how it always begins, with my own curiosity being sparked,” Bigelow says. “I made A HOUSE OF DYNAMITE because I was curious, not to offer prescriptions or policy solutions.”
As Gabriel Basso says in the trailer, taking down a nuclear attack is like hitting a bullet with a bullet; the film focuses on the different elements of the response to a nuclear attack. “It was quite tense, ultrarealistic in terms of what we understood to be the true reaction in a situation like this,” Elba said at Venice. “For me as an actor, it was an incredible ride. It was like being in a documentary at the same time as having the benefit of being an actor.”
You’ll be able to take that ride for yourself when A HOUSE OF DYNAMITE hits select theaters Oct. 3 in the UK, globally Oct. 10, and Netflix on Oct. 24.
