Kathryn Bigelow’s newest film opens with a black screen and a sound—deep, unidentifiable, metallic, inhuman. It’s a fittingly menacing opening for a film about the possibility of nuclear apocalypse. The first image we see shortly afterward is the launch of an intercontinental ballistic missile, which we will later learn is pointed at the United States, carrying a nuclear warhead toward an American city. A House of Dynamite dramatizes the professional response to such an event, following personnel in the military, the President’s office, FEMA, and other arms of the U.S. government. It turns its procedural attention to the ways America has—and hasn’t—planned for such an event. Rightly, it offers us few comforts in its 112-minute runtime and demands instead that we sit with the anticipation of the horrors that humans can unleash.

One of the comforts the film withholds is the set of familiar conventions we associate with suspense movies. The film’s first forty minutes seem to check all the expected boxes—a highly competent crew of people rushing to execute a risky plan to meet a threat of terrifying proportions—but then Bigelow yanks all that away and restarts the story from its beginning with a different crew responding to the same threat. This puncturing of suspense is a feature, not a bug. While some writers in online film forums have complained volubly about it, the point of Bigelow’s anti-suspense choice is clear: This subject is not something to be excited by. It’s something to be confronted.

Bigelow’s film considers exactly how a nuclear attack on the United States could begin, showing us repeatedly in nearly real time how an ICBM launched from a mysterious source might make its way toward American airspace, how military personnel would attempt to detonate it far from Earth, how the brightest minds in government would grapple with the threat, how people could be undone by the enormity of the danger and the overwhelming, incomprehensible magnitude of the imminent devastation. It also reveals numerous points of failure in U.S. systems along the way, including the fact that, unlike rank-and-file servicemembers, the one person with the actual nuclear codes is also the one person who has practiced the response to a nuclear attack the least.

When taking a procedural approach to the subject matter of nuclear warfare, there’s a danger of treating it in such a way that the physical, personal, moral hazard of a world-ending event feels too remote to be truthful. Christopher Nolan fell prey to this danger in Oppenheimer, which technologized the problem of nuclear weaponry and barely nodded to the grievous, miserable tragedy that the film’s real-life counterpart unleashed on other human beings. Bigelow, with her interest in precisely how the end of the world might come about, runs this risk in A House of Dynamite, too. However, she mostly avoids the trap of taking too chilly an interest in the mechanics of the event by letting us get to know her characters in snapshots interspersed throughout the drama, as well as by bringing their wholeness to how they, as fragile human beings, respond to the beginning of the end.

These characters, while steady and extremely competent, are also people confronting the unimaginable. Making the most of the expert performances of her exceptional cast, Bigelow’s camera lingers on the characters’ faces and bodies and lets us breathe—or not breathe—with them. The abundance of exposition necessary to tell the story of a highly technical process—responding to the launch of an ICBM—vanishes in these moments into an understanding of how individual humans might respond to the inhuman monstrosity bearing down on them. Bigelow lets their performances speak. As things begin to go badly, a soldier’s voice quakes, another’s eyes well up, still another is gripped by dry heaves. All personnel execute their duties precisely as they’ve been trained to do, but their faces and bodies bespeak their anguish. In one remarkable moment, a steel-jawed officer (played by Rebecca Ferguson) seems literally pushed backward by the force of the realization that a key defense against the ICBM has failed.

One of the more alarming themes of A House of Dynamite lurks quietly in the film’s subtext. In the film’s America, POTUS is a thoughtful, humane, competent leader. Likewise the leaders of other branches of the response. No one is motivated by narcissism, emotional reactivity, or personal grudges. No one appears to have been appointed to a powerful position as a result of cronyism or of toadying to an irrational actor. Everyone in the film is doing their best, and their best is considerable, regardless of the everyday apocalypses they’re facing in their own personal lives (a breakup, a sick child, divorce proceedings gone badly wrong). The failures of systems are the commonplace failures of technology, not those produced by personal failings or even ordinary human error. How much worse would it be, the film forces us to ask, if the real people charged with decision-making at the highest levels weren’t motivated by professionalism, weren’t the smartest people in the room, or weren’t for one reason or another up to the challenge of making a wise decision? A House of Dynamite shows an American wartime response made by an imaginary, idealized America—and it’s an America that still isn’t fully up to the challenge. What would happen, then, if our America today were faced with a real nuclear attack?

There is much that Bigelow doesn’t show us. Two characters write personal notes to one another on a shared notepad, but we never see what the notes say. We never learn what becomes of two characters who had enough advance warning to drive somewhere safe—or whether such a safe place could even continue to exist for long. On a broader scale, we never learn who launched the nuclear missile in the first place. We never see an explosion. No one dies onscreen. Bigelow insists on the discomfort of uncertainty, which is fitting in a film whose purpose appears to be to say, “Look. Look at what could still happen, even under nearly optimal conditions.” In this sense, despite the invisibility of violence in the film’s world, Bigelow has made a rigorously anti-nuclear film, one that leaves a great many questions unanswered—paramount among them, what in the world are we to do?