Welcome back to Flick Picks, your twice-monthly movie fix. In this installment, we see that films don’t need explosions to make you sweat, as psychological tension can be just as combustible.
Now playing
One of my goals with these capsule reviews is to give readers a sense of what they’re walking into if they see a movie I’ve covered. That’s easy when it comes to “Die, My Love,” a psychological drama directed by Lynne Ramsay, the Scottish filmmaker who gave the world “We Need to Talk About Kevin.” Imagine being trapped in a POW sweatbox with no one around to let you out.
Unlike that scenario, you can leave the theater. But I encourage you to stay put. You might not encourage your friends see it, but there’s a good chance you’ll never forget that you did.
“Die, My Love” locks viewers in the aforementioned sweatbox with Grace (Jennifer Lawrence), a novelist who leaves New York with her husband, Jackson (Robert Pattinson) to live in a house he inherited in the wilds of Montana. It’s the literal middle of nowhere – an endless horizon of nothing in every direction – and yet as Grace begins to feel trapped and lose her mind, no movie setting has ever felt more claustrophobic.
Part of that comes from Ramsay’s decision to present the film in a square frame, like an old television screen, leaving the edges of the theater’s screen blank. In a theater with good sound, you’ll hear noises that seem to come from miles away, yet you’ll feel boxed in – trapped inside Grace’s deteriorating psyche.
What a way to make you inhabit a character’s mind. It works. When “Die, My Love” ended, I stepped outside The Majestic on Broad Street and took a deep breath, grateful for the open air.
Grace and Jackson seem well-matched at first, but only in the beginning, when the sex is great. But as the honeymoon fades and Grace faces the weight of her choices (marrying Jackson and leaving her old life), as well as things that have been thrust upon her (motherhood and care of a dog that never stops barking), the unraveling begins.
Never have two characters in a film seemed more ill-suited to share the same space. Yet I can’t imagine two actors more suited to play them. In a year packed with strong performances, Lawrence and Pattinson deliver two of the best.
Lawrence throws herself into Grace with fearless abandon and delivers a devastating portrait of a woman who’s mind is slipping away. As she clawed furiously at the wallpaper of a locked bathroom, I felt her desperation. Pattison, meanwhile, perfectly embodies a man enraged by the freedom he’s surrendered for a tour of domestic hell.
Ramsay seems to have approached writing and directing with the same surrender to impulse. The film feels wild and unpredictable, yet every image and sound seems deliberate and every choice purposeful.
So, no, “Die My Love” is not a good time. But it’s a remarkable piece of cinema – one I fear audiences will skip and awards voters will overlook. It’s nonlinear structure, metaphorical ambiguity and animalistic approach to cinema might alienate viewers, but that doesn’t diminish its achievements.
Plus, what other movie gives us Sissy Spacek sleepwalking through the Montana night with a shotgun?
New on streaming
“This is insanity,” cries the president of the United States.
“No, this is reality,” replies the general in charge of U.S. Strategic Command as a single ballistic missile speeds toward Chicago and POTUS weighs his options for responding.
We hear this exchange twice in “A House of Dynamite,” a nuclear war thriller streaming on Netflix. Directed with precision and tension by Kathryn Bigelow of “The Hurt Locker” fame, the film unfolds over the same 18-minute window, viewed from three vantage points: the White House Situation Room, U.S. Strategic Command and the president himself.
Unlike earlier nuclear dramas such as “The Day After,” “A House of Dynamite” isn’t about the instant when thousands of warheads erase civilization. It’s about the madness of the preceding moments – how every safeguard against Armageddon still comes down to fallible humans making life-or-death choices in minutes.
The film is steeped in unsettling irony. It surfaces early in the casual small talk – sports scores, sick children, engagement plans – that fills the moments before the launch detection. One second, Idris Elba’s POTUS is shooting hoops with children at a WNBA summer camp; the next, he’s deciding the fate of humanity.
The fear comes not from explosions but from watching these people react in recognizably human – and sometimes chilling – ways. Some rise to the occasion; others falter; a few freeze completely.
Noah Oppenheim’s script deftly balances tension and insight. My favorite line comes as the president reflects that humankind has built “a house of dynamite” and chosen to live inside it, trusting the threat of mutually assured destruction to keep it from blowing apart. Oppenheim also does masterful work charting the maze of possibilities – where the missile might have come from, how adversaries could misread a response and what each retaliatory scenario might unleash – without ever slowing the film’s momentum.
Equal credit belongs to editor Kirk Baxter, who, with Bigelow surely beside him in the edit bay, orchestrates a staggering web of overlapping dialogue and cross-cutting tension without losing coherence for even a frame.
So yes, “A House of Dynamite” is superbly made. Some might argue that nothing new emerges as each chapter replays the same events and, indeed, we hear many of the same conversations three times. But that criticism misunderstands the film’s design. When you consider the limits of perspective, its repetition is the point.
Whether you appreciate “A House of Dynamite” could hinge on how you receive the ending. It’s been, to put it mildly, divisive. My advice: watch the film twice. Knowing where the story lands makes its themes resonate more deeply the second time.
For me, “A House of Dynamite” earns its name in the moments that confront us with the insanity we’ve built. One image that lingers: a bust of Abraham Lincoln in the White House – a man who once bore the same title, yet could never have imagined the staggering horror of the choices his successors now face.
From the vault
I have the perfect movie pairing for “A House of Dynamite”: 1983’s “WarGames.” Yes, the cheesy but awesome Cold War techno-thriller starring a baby-faced Matthew Broderick as a teenage hacker.
OK, Broderick had probably hit puberty before filming “WarGames,” but just barely, judging by how young he looks. And sure, the movie is packed with clunky, dated tech and a plot more improbable than a Titans’ Super Bowl win in February – but that’s exactly what makes it a blast to watch.
It also boasts one of the most unforgettable movie sets of the 1980s: the NORAD command center, ruled over by the king of smirk and gum-smacking himself, Dabney Coleman. When director John Badham’s camera sweeps across that massive wall of blinking terminals and giant screen displays, it’s pure nostalgic magic.
For the uninitiated, here’s the setup: Broderick plays David, a young hacker who thinks he’s breaking into a game company’s server but actually taps into WOPR, a NORAD supercomputer designed to run war simulations. In the process, he nearly triggers World War III.
Between rolling my eyes at the ludicrous bits (NORAD gives public tours, which allows David to escape unnoticed after being captured) and geeking out over the vintage tech, I found a kernel of the same dread that fuels “A House of Dynamite”: the terrifying fragility of the systems meant to prevent nuclear catastrophe.
The two films even open in nearly the same way: men reporting for what should be a routine day overseeing the nation’s nuclear arsenal, only to be thrust within minutes into the unimaginable.
Despite its sobering undertones, “WarGames” remains the kind of fun, high-concept blockbuster the ’80s churned out effortlessly – and it wraps up with an ending no one could possibly complain about.
Rolling out the snacks
For a sweet counterpoint to all the nuclear-age tension, mix up a round of Cold War Cola Floats: scoop a generous serving of vanilla ice cream into a tall glass, pour chilled Coca-Cola over it until it foams to the rim and drop in a bright red (for a Cold War–era flourish) maraschino cherry. It’s perfect for sipping while Broderick saves the world from accidental annihilation.