The real world is in terrifying flux and seemingly seconds from disaster, but what if things got worse? That seems to be the idea behind A House of Dynamite, the new film from Kathryn Bigelow. The Hurt Locker and Zero Dark Thirty director’s latest will hit Netflix in October, just in time to blow up Oscar season (assuming the real world hasn’t already gone kaput.)
Details are still in short supply, but the brief log line the streamer has released makes the project sound like a hot-button—and deeply stressful—political thriller that will play on very of-the-moment anxieties. Looks like we’re going to DEFCON-1, folks: “When a single, unattributed missile is launched at the United States, a race begins to determine who is responsible and how to respond.” The project, known until recently as “Untitled Kathryn Bigelow White House Thriller,” will presumably give us a ringside seat in the Oval Office as the crisis unfolds.
The word “nuclear” isn’t explicitly used, but for a single missile launch to cause such a conniption that it serves as the driving force for a major Hollywood movie, chances are it’s probably atomic. Working on this educated presumption, we may be looking at a film that calls back to some of the nuke thrillers of the ‘50s—like Sidney Lumet’s 1964 thriller Fail-Safe, which follows an American nuclear bomber erroneously ordered to toast Moscow at the height of the Cold War, and the attempts on both sides to stop it.
A House of Dynamite will be Bigelow’s first film in eight years, the last being 2017’s Detroit. Her past credits include the original Point Break and the cult apocalyptic thriller Strange Days, but she’s arguably best known for being the first woman to win Best Director at the Oscars for 2008’s The Hurt Locker, a hangnail thriller that follows an American bomb-disposal specialist during the Iraq War. Her 2012 thriller Zero Dark Thirty, a dramatization of the years-long hunt for Osama Bin Laden, was similarly well-timed—it opened just over a year and a half after the Al-Qaeda ringleader’s death—and was nominated for five Oscars.
The script for A House of Dynamite is by Noah Oppenheim, who’s no stranger to a White House-in-crisis setting—he co-wrote the Netflix series Zero Day, with Robert De Niro as a former U.S. president dealing with a massive cyberattack, and also wrote the script for Pablo Larraín’s Oscar-nominated Jackie, starring Natalie Portman as JFK’s embattled First Lady.
Who’s in the cast of A House of Dynamite?
It’s an extremely stacked ensemble for Bigelow’s latest, although none of the characters have been announced. Will it be Elba—who plays the British prime minister in the new Amazon comedy Heads of State—for POTUS? Per Tudum, the announced cast so far includes:
- Idris Elba
- Rebecca Ferguson
- Gabriel Basso
- Jared Harris
- Tracy Letts
- Anthony Ramos
- Jonah Hauer-King
- Moses Ingram
- Greta Lee
- Jason Clarke
- Malachi Beasley
- Brian Tee
- Brittany O’Grady
- Gbenga Akinnagbe
- Willa Fitzgerald
- Renée Elise Goldsberry
- Kyle Allen
- Kaitlyn Dever
When is A House of Dynamite going to launch?
Brace for an autumn impact. A House of Dynamite will open in limited theatrical release sometime in October, before it hits Netflix on October 25th.
This story originally appeared in British GQ.
