Kathryn Bigelow, long associated with military and intelligence thrillers like ‘The Hurt Locker’ and ‘Zero Dark Thirty’, returns to familiar terrain with ‘A House of Dynamite’ – a taut, nerve-shredding drama that unfolds almost entirely in real time.

The setup is simple but terrifying: an incoming missile is heading for a major U.S. city, and those in the military command network have only minutes to determine not just how to stop it, but who sent it. A wrong call could mean retaliation against the wrong country… and the end of civilization. The result is a film that blends the procedural intensity of ‘13 Days’ with the fractured perspective of ‘Jackie Brown’, showing the same crisis from multiple angles – the Pentagon, the White House, and the President at a sporting event.

Bigelow is less interested in the spectacle of destruction than in the unbearable build-up. The devastation may or may not come – what matters here is the decision-making, the human fallibility, and the pressure of knowing this could be the last day anyone sees their family again.

The film’s realism is meticulous: much of it takes place in command centres, offices, and briefing rooms, but the tension is almost unbearable. At one point, we learn there’s only a 61% chance of intercepting the missile – as one general puts it, “It’s like trying to hit a bullet with a bullet.”

The structure is ingenious. Each act retells the same series of events from a new point of view, revealing how supporting characters in one story become central in another. By the final act, when we meet the President (Idris Elba), we see how every decision, every miscommunication, has rippled upward.

Unlike old-school disaster films where Bruce Willis or Ben Affleck might save the world with seconds to spare, this one offers no easy heroism. Everyone here is competent, rational, and utterly human — and Bigelow leaves us asking the most sobering question of all: what would you do if you had only minutes left before the world ended?

‘A House of Dynamite’ is both thrilling and devastating – a masterclass in sustained tension, realism, and moral clarity.