Eight years since her last feature, Kathryn Bigelow returns with an unrelenting chokehold thriller so controlled, kinetic and unsettlingly immersive that you stagger out at the end of it wondering if the world will still be intact. Though it’s less a war film than a drama about the aggressive threat of war, A House of Dynamite is very much of a piece with the director’s later-career gut punches, The Hurt Locker and Zero Dark Thirty.

It’s a testament to the justifiably high regard in which Bigelow is held that she has drawn such a deep bench of first-rate actors, several of them onscreen for just a brief scene or two yet all making vivid impressions. The large ensemble cast has no weak link.

People tend to dip into the same pool of adjectives to describe the director’s best work — raw, gritty, unflinching, intense and documentary-like in its vigilant attention to even the tiniest nuance. Her muscular new film for Netflix is certainly all those things, but it’s also smart, emotional, ingeniously constructed and rigorously economical in its storytelling. Much credit for that obviously goes to Noah Oppenheim’s incisive screenplay, but the wallop would not be what it is without Bigelow’s laser focus.

With minimal preamble, the film thrusts us into the fraught 20 minutes until expected impact of a nuclear missile from an unidentified point of origin, inching across banks of tracking monitors toward a major U.S. city. The ability of whatever country launched the missile to evade early satellite detection suggests a possible overture to a carefully planned multipart attack.

The action captures the same arc of time — with maybe a difference of a few minutes at either end — three times over, taking in responses from the highest levels in the White House Situation Room and Strategic Command offices to scattered defense bases to motorcades and choppers. The insight into crisis procedure and the split-second decisions required of vast teams of people is riveting.

Purely as a feat of adrenaline-pumping editing and cinematography, the movie is a knockout. Kirk Baxter’s arrhythmic cutting is designed around quicksilver shifts that, along with Barry Ackroyd’s restlessly attentive, mostly handheld camerawork, allow Bigelow to redirect our attention with virtuoso command. Even if it often recalls quick-cut, accelerated-pace TV shows like 24, the aesthetic feels fresh. Brit cinematographer Ackroyd, who shot The Hurt Locker and Detroit for Bigelow, as well as various Paul Greengrass features, including United 93 and Captain Phillips, is a master of nerve-shredding visual language.

The tightly wound tension is maintained also by Volker Bertelmann’s propulsive score, which starts with ominous juddering groans and keeps shapeshifting throughout.

The movie opens with some useful context: At the end of the Cold War, world powers reached a consensus that the planet was better off with fewer nuclear weapons. But that era is over, as is the naïve notion that any “duck and cover” drill would be of the slightest use. Multiple nations now have annihilation-level nuclear assets, and yet, even as the threat continues escalating, public concern has flatlined.

The first part opens at the 49th Missile Defense Battalion in Fort Greely, Alaska, a military base where a crew under the command of Major Daniel Gonzalez (Anthony Ramos) is responsible for detecting incoming threats and destroying them with ground-based interceptor missiles.

The scene shifts to Washington D.C. as the city is waking up. Captain Olivia Walker (Rebecca Ferguson) is a clear-headed communication point with military brass like General Anthony Brady (Tracy Letts), initially eager to chat about the previous night’s baseball game until the gravity of the situation becomes clear, and civilian Defense Secretary Reid Baker (Jared Harris).

Oppenheim’s script is careful to avoid letting windows into the characters’ personal lives become movie-ish and sentimental. But it increases the stakes to be aware that Walker has a son with a worrying fever at home with his father, that she cares enough to buck up the spirits of a colleague (Malachi Beasley) who’s planning to propose to his girlfriend that night, or that Baker is still shaken by the death of his wife and struggling to bridge the distance with his daughter (Kaitlyn Dever).

This is very much an ensemble piece with no starring roles, but other key characters include Deputy National Security Advisor Jake Baerington (Gabriel Basso), whose pregnant wife works at the Pentagon; FEMA official Cathy Rogers (Moses Ingram), who resists being put on the priority evacuation list; and Lieutenant Commander Robert Reeves (Jonah Hauer-King), who advises POTUS on retaliatory strategies.

Watching moments of fear pass across the faces of these disciplined, highly trained officials, or listening in as a young military officer calls his mother, becomes progressively more heart-wrenching.

Idris Elba gets top billing as POTUS, but while he has sole authority over the use of nuclear weapons, he’s no more important in the scheme of things than any other main character. In the first take he’s off-site and heard only over the phone, his screen on the comms wall remaining blank. Much later, we see him shoot hoops and speak warmly with a girls’ school basketball team before being rushed out when word of the crisis arrives.

The president also places calls to the First Lady (Renée Elise Goldsberry), in Kenya as part of an elephant conservation program. (A nod to the Obamas seems implicit, starting with the basketball scene.) The film doesn’t idealize the president as a man of unhesitating certainties. The doubts he shares with Reeves about the decisions he’s facing are quietly moving.

Without either damning or lauding him, the script drops wry hints that POTUS’ relaxed charm is as much a part of the package as his experience and authority. In an amusing moment, the head of his security detail (Brian Tee) tells a colleague, “He’s my third and they’re all chronically late narcissists. At least this one reads a paper.”

If moments like that suggest that Bigelow weaves in occasional reprieves from the anxiety, that’s not the case. Keeping multiple plates spinning as the clock rapidly winds down, she gives us intimate access to people faced with dwindling options, especially once countermeasures fail. “There’s no plan B,” says senior Situation Room official Admiral Mark Miller (Jason Clarke).

The candor with which the movie shows the slender probability of destroying an incoming nuclear missile (“It’s like trying to hit a bullet with a bullet”) is profoundly unsettling. And an almost incidental scene, in which the NSA’s North Korea expert (Greta Lee) watches a Battle of Gettysburg reenactment with her son on a day off, seems a sardonic acknowledgment that war for America is a blustery display with little long-range vision.

Bigelow groups A House of Dynamite together with The Hurt Locker and Zero Dark Thirty as an “unofficial triptych,” all three films dealing with military and intelligence operations.

With thematic cohesion and a refusal to soften the edges of white-knuckle situations all firmly within the realm of possibility, the director lobs an unsettling “it could happen” reality at us, showing capable people doing the best they can in extremis but offering no false reassurances that everything will be fine. Ending on the perfect sobering note — and image — it’s a crackling thriller and a wake-up call from complacency.