Bigelow returns Director turns her lens on nuclear fears

An unattributed missile is launched at the United States, setting off a desperate effort inside the White House to determine who fired it and how to respond: not the latest news headline, but the premise of Kathryn Bigelow's new political thriller, A House of Dynamite, which will premiere at the Venice film festival.

- Nadia Khomami

An unattributed missile is launched at the United States, setting off a desperate effort inside the White House to determine who fired it and how to respond: not the latest news headline, but the premise of Kathryn Bigelow's new political thriller, A House of Dynamite, which will premiere at the Venice film festival.

For Bigelow, 73, the film marks a return to the large-scale, geopolitically attuned storytelling that made her one of the most decorated directors of her generation.

Few filmmakers have been so consistently engaged with the faultlines of American power as Bigelow. In The Hurt Locker (2008), she charted the psychological intensity of a bomb disposal unit in Iraq. Four years later, in Zero Dark Thirty, she dramatized the decade-long hunt for Osama bin Laden.

Her latest film turns to a different, though no less urgent, anxiety: the prospect of nuclear catastrophe.

“I grew up in an era when hiding under your school desk was considered the go-to protocol for surviving an atomic bomb,” Bigelow said before the premiere. “Today, the danger has only escalated. Multiple nations possess enough nuclear weapons to end civilization within minutes. And yet, there’s a kind of collective numbness—a quiet normalization of the unthinkable.”