“An incredibly tense look at the impossible choice individuals have to make on the brink of nuclear war.”

Almost a year ago to the day, Kathryn Bigelow brought her most recent film A House of Dynamite to the Venice Film Festival, in which a ballistic missile, launched from somewhere in East Asia and targeted at the US, caused some tough decision-making as information travelled up the chain of command. The protagonist of Alexandre Smia’s Jupiter finds himself in a similar precarious situation, except Smia situates his nerve-wracking tale of the brink of a nuclear war right at the top: the president of the French Republic. Assembling a stellar cast for his debut feature, including filmmaker-slash-actor Cédric Kahn whose own film 15/18 premieres on the same day, Smia is willing to go a step further than Kathryn Bigelow in identifying the aggressor. By sticking to close quarters and following a linear timeline, he creates a veritable knuckle-biter that shares one flaw with A House of Dynamite: it withholds a resolution.

Paul Archambault (Denis Ménochet) is barely sworn in as French president and his new job already requires him to make impossible decisions: as he and his security council are contemplating whether they should pay a visit to his Ukrainian counterpart, locked in a ceasefire agreement with Russia after years of war, an assassination attempt on the Russian president Chernov pulls down the house of cards. The Russians immediately blame their foe and threaten to retaliate in the harshest way possible. Archambault and his security council weigh their options, with his Defense Minister (Reda Kateb) urging military action to support Ukraine, and his Foreign Affairs Minister (played by Dominique Blanc) advising caution. From Jupiter, the high-security nuclear bunker under the Élysée, Archambault confers with France’s allies, who are similarly divided about the response that should be made. Notably, the US is unwilling to support Ukraine and suggests the country give up large parts of its territory, a reflection of the current Administration’s stance (although under Donald Trump this can change every day). As Russia starts to play hardball, detonating a nuclear weapon above the Black Sea, Archambault is forced to make a decision about fight or flight: does he match Russia’s power play, or does he leave a friendly nation hanging?

Essentially, Jupiter is little more than a series of tense, pressure-cooker conversations, but Smia manages to slowly turn the screws, thereby pushing the audience to the edge of their seats. The intense and at times Zimmer-esque bombastic score by Olivier Marguerit plus cinematographer Nicolas Loir’s sharp work with light and shadow, often shooting in close-up to get the most out of the actors’ emotions, continuously raise the stakes in the film’s perfectly taut 85-minute runtime. The language of the conversations is diplomatic, where much is to be read between the courtesy and formality with which these heads of state shower each other. Smia’s greatest triumph is that he keeps the audience guessing where all this is going to end up: either side backing down at the last minute, or nuclear war. He keeps us guessing, unfortunately, because Jupiter doesn’t provide a definitive answer, a somewhat unsatisfying conclusion after one-and-a-half hours of nail-biting stuff.

Smia is helped by his cast, with the president’s security council rounded out by the likes of Céline Sallette’s Prime Minister, André Dussollier’s Chief of Staff, and Ella Rumpf and Frédéric Pierrot in less defined political and military roles, respectively. But the film belongs to Denis Ménochet, perhaps best known for his role in Rodrigo Sorogoyen’s As Bestas. As a man experiencing the worst possible first day at the office, his Paul Archambault is the embodiment of the point Smia tries to make, a point similar to Bigelow’s in her film: leaving the fate of millions in the hands of a single person puts an impossible burden on anyone. Smia’s screenplay defines the push and pull between the president’s advisors better, and Ménochet simply gives a better, more layered presidential performance than Idris Elba in A House of Dynamite, hammering the aforementioned point home much more effectively. Smia’s screenplay, co-written with Thomas Finkielkraut, allows for Archambault to succumb to the pressure, which results in a beautiful teary scene by Ménochet. There are several such moments, where the decorum is dropped and human emotion takes over in a believable way, and they add up to Jupiter being more than just a tense thriller. But even on its base level, Alexandre Smia has created an incredibly tense look at the impossible choice individuals have to make on the brink of nuclear war.