A knife's-edge nuclear drama

SOMETIMES MOVIES REACH US IN A PLACE beyond mere assessment: you walk away from the thing you’ve just seen not really knowing if you'd call it good or bad, but you know something has shifted inside you.

- BY STEPHANIE ZACHAREK

That’s the effect of A House of Dynamite, directed by Kathryn Bigelow and releasing 15 years after she became the first woman to win the Oscar for Best Director, for The Hurt Locker. The picture is precise, potent, ingeniously constructed. But even though it focuses on the nuts and bolts of how the U.S. government might respond to a nuclear attack, there’s something ghostly and unreal about it too. Without spelling out any grim details, it lays bare all sorts of global realities we don’t want to think about. This is a real-world horror movie that’s unsettling for all that it doesn’t show.