An unattributed missile is launched at the US, 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 political thriller A House of Dynamite, which will premiere at the Venice film festival.
The film marks a return to the large-scale, geopolitically attuned storytelling that made Bigelow one of the most decorated directors of her generation.
Few film-makers have been so consistently engaged with the faultlines of American power as Bigelow. In 2008’s The Hurt Locker she charted the psychological intensity of a bomb disposal unit in Iraq. Four years later, in Zero Dark Thirty, she dramatised 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, 73, said before the premiere. “Today, the danger has only escalated. Multiple nations possess enough nuclear weapons to end civilisation within minutes. And yet, there’s a kind of collective numbness – a quiet normalisation of the unthinkable.”
Bigelow was born in San Carlos, California, in 1951, the daughter of a factory manager and a librarian. By her own account she was a shy child, drawn to art as an outlet. She studied painting at the San Francisco Art Institute before moving to New York, where she immersed herself in conceptual art and studied under Susan Sontag at Columbia. “Painting is a bit elitist,” she later said. “Film crosses culture and class.”
Her first feature, The Loveless (1981), co-directed with James Cameron and starring a young Willem Dafoe, gave little indication of the trajectory to come. (Bigelow and Cameron married in 1989, though the union lasted only two years.)
In the 1980s and 1990s she built a reputation directing cult thrillers that inverted genre conventions, including the vampire western Near Dark (1987), the cop drama Blue Steel (1990), and the surfer-heist thriller Point Break (1991), which starred Keanu Reeves and was later hailed as a cult classic in action cinema. Bigelow’s pivot toward historical, politically grounded narratives came with K-19: The Widowmaker (2002), a cold war drama about a group of men aboard the Soviet Union’s first nuclear-powered submarine, starring Harrison Ford and Liam Neeson.
But her real breakthrough did not come until 2008 with The Hurt Locker, a film she partly self-financed and shot under punishing conditions in Jordan, where temperatures reached 54C. The story of three soldiers disarming roadside bombs, written by the journalist Mark Boal, won six Academy Awards, including best picture and best director. Bigelow became the first woman to win the directing prize, beating her ex-husband, who was nominated for Avatar.
Until Bigelow, only three women had been nominated for best director in nearly a century of Academy Awards. In the years since, just two others – Chloé Zhao and Jane Campion – have joined her. But Bigelow resisted the moment’s symbolism and has repeatedly rejected overt labels. In interviews, she paraphrased Gertrude Stein – “A filmmaker is a filmmaker is a filmmaker” – and said her aptitude was not to “break gender roles or gender traditions” but to “explore and push the medium”.
Still, critics have pointed to the undercurrents of masculinity and power in her films, which tend to centre on themes of violence. In 2010, Time Magazine paid tribute to her ability to capture “the intense, skewered madness of war and the distortion in men’s souls”, naming her as one of the 100 most influential people in the world.
Bigelow’s follow-up in 2012, Zero Dark Thirty, revisited the US’s “war on terror” with a procedural account of the CIA’s pursuit of Bin Laden, starring Jessica Chastain. The film was a critical and commercial success but provoked controversy for its depiction of “enhanced interrogation” techniques such as waterboarding. Anti-torture activists staged protests outside its premiere in Washington DC.
Bigelow defended the work, writing in the Los Angeles Times: “Depiction is not endorsement. It does seem illogical to me to make a case against torture by ignoring or denying the role it played in US counter-terrorism policy and practices.” The director also described herself as a “lifelong pacifist” and said such sentiments would be more appropriately directed at those who instituted and ordered US policies.
In the decade since Zero Dark Thirty, Bigelow’s output has been sparse. She directed Detroit in 2017, a harrowing account of the 1967 Detroit uprisings, and produced the Netflix documentary Cartel Land in 2015, which won an Emmy.
That long gap is partly what makes A House of Dynamite so highly anticipated. Produced by Netflix and starring Idris Elba, Rebecca Ferguson, Tracy Letts, Greta Lee and Jared Harris, it unfolds through the perspective of White House officials grappling with an imminent ballistic threat. It will premiere in competition in Venice before a limited theatrical release and a rollout on Netflix in October.
“I wanted to make a film that confronts this paradox – to explore the madness of a world that lives under the constant shadow of annihilation, yet rarely speaks of it,” Bigelow said.
For a director who has long been drawn to life’s toughest adventures, including once climbing Kilimanjaro, it marks the resumption of a career defined by confronting some of the world’s most volatile flashpoints.
