Warning: This story contains spoilers from A House of Dynamite, which began streaming on Netflix October 24.

A nuclear missile is barrelling toward Chicago, and the only people who know about it have just 18 minutes to react. Kathryn Bigelow ’s gripping thriller A House of Dynamite captures those 18 minutes in nearly real time, using a three-act structure that follows different points of view—military personnel in Fort Greely in Alaska; officials in the White House Situation Room; leaders in Strategic Command (or Stratcom), which controls the country’s nuclear arsenal; and the president himself—to create a pressure-cooker drama that unfolds as these characters stare down what might be the end of civilization.

The film’s inciting incident is fiction, but the play-by-play of what h

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