Returning to intersection of facts and thrills

Film-maker Kathryn Bigelow's Netflix political thriller, A House Of Dynamite, is about a nuclear missile headed to the US

- Manohla Dargis

Actor Anthony Ramos as Major Daniel Gonzalez in A House Of Dynamite. PHOTO: NETFLIX

(NETFLIX)

When I pulled up to Kathryn Bigelow's house in upstate New York in September, I could not figure out where she was.

Some years back, the American filmmaker had moved from Los Angeles after enduring one too many fires.

She has been riding horses since childhood, and whenever a fire broke out, she would rush to where she had stabled hers, load them in a trailer and drive off, trying to keep ahead of the flames.

She now owns a sweeping estate, where she keeps a few bays and some other people's horses.

When I finally spotted her that day, the 73-year-old was walking out of a barn, her silhouette as strikingly backlit and framed as any image in one of her movies.

The first time we met was in 2009, just before The Hurt Locker (2008) opened. An anguished drama about an American bomb-disposal team in the Iraq War, the movie quickly racked up critics' prizes, going on to receive nine Oscar nominations.

Bigelow went on to become the first woman to win best director, and she also picked up the Oscar for best picture.

Suddenly, the world's attention was on a female director, a gendered category that she had long resisted.

Her latest movie A House Of Dynamite, which is available on Netflix, is a tense, what-if apocalyptic political thriller that turns on the efforts of American government and military personnel who try to stop an intercontinental ballistic missile of unknown origin from hitting the continental United States.

It was especially unnerving watching the movie - featuring an ensemble cast led by Idris Elba, Rebecca Ferguson and Gabriel Basso - several months after the Trump administration had fired, then unfired, some 300 employees of the National Nuclear Security Administration. The agency is charged with the readiness of America's nuclear arsenal.