Nuclear thriller makes the unthinkable vividly clear

Kathryn Bigelow expertly builds dread and anxiety in ‘A House of Dynamite.’

- GLENN WHIPP

REBECCA Ferguson is on alert from the White House Situation Room in "A House of Dynamite."

EROS HOAGLAND Netflix

As if we didn’t have enough to worry about these days, “A House of Dynamite,” the crackling new thriller from director Kathryn Bigelow, wants to add one more fear to keep us up at night — the specter of atomic annihilation.

You may be old enough to remember when nuclear anxiety was No. 1 on the hit parade of humanity's greatest concerns. Bigelow’s new movie, her first in eight years, wants to remind us that the warheads haven't gone anywhere. In fact, with the world becoming more chaotic and unstable, the threat they pose, the film argues, is graver than ever.

Unimaginable, you say. “A House of Dynamite” asks us to imagine it.

Tobe precise, itasksusto imagine it repeatedly as the movie is divided into three sections, each focusing ona different and sometimes overlapping set of people responding to the fact that a nuclear missile of unknown origin has launched somewhere in the Pacific and is heading toward the American Midwest, probably Chicago. Unless it is stopped in about 18 minutes, some 10 million people will die.

The first section bounces between a U.S. missile defense center in Alaska, where Maj. David Gonzalez (Anthony Ramos) and his team first notice the missile and are charged with intercepting it, and the White House Situation Room, a flurry of activity and cascading panic.