Dr. Strangelove at Glasgow Film Festival restrospective – Small Petty Men with power and destructive tendencies, scarily relevent in 2026 and, yes, it’s the bomb

Retrospective Feature: GFF Dr. Strangelove.

“Gentlemen, you can’t fight in here! This is the war room.”

Director Stanley Kubrick’s black comedy, Dr. Strangelove, Or How I Stopped Worrying and Learned to Love the Bomb, will play at Glasgow Film Festival 2026.

Truth to Power, this year’s retrospective, deals with directors with ‘daunting targets – power, corruption and injustice,’ creating impressive classics that, impressively, hold ‘sharp relevance to this day.’

Written by Kubrick, alongside journalist, satirist and counter-culture essayist Terry Southern, Stangelove’s nuclear suspense seemed at first, to me, a nightmarish faraway. I only knew the Cold War, the Cuban Missile Crisis, in abstract shades. Would this be another popular, influential classic I could ‘technically appreciate,’ yet feel very little about one way or the other? 

No. Not even close. 

Dr. Strangelove is the bomb. (Haha.)

Animated with fascistic absurdity, Kubrick’s eccentric anti-war film is, in fact, pertinent to our current day. Too pertinent.

Does this sound familiar?  A blathering, pompous and ultimately terrifying idiot blows up the whole planet. Yes. It’s quite dramatic, really. The blathering, pompous idiot blows up the whole planet because he is convinced, in earnest, that water fluoridation is a Communist plot designed to contaminate ’precious American bodily fluids.’

Charming stuff.

It seems true, more now than ever, that the world is run by small men who are intent on blowing things up to make themselves look bigger. Strangelove is not just about the Cold War. It’s about idiot-proof systems. Made by idiots. Hysterical idiocy, imploding into a cataclysmic outcome desired by nobody. 

The actors are elastic. Explosive performances across the board. Peter Sellers, in particular, stands out, playing the titular role, RAF Captain Lionel Mandrake and lousy U.S. President Merkin Muffley. The cast’s hyper-mobility marshals the movie into disordered hilarity. Hilarity that, as Kubrick never lets the audience forget, is shadowed by the very real unreality of the film’s marching threat: the world’s undoing, sublimated into terrible comedy. 

Some necessary background: The Cuban Missile Crisis happened two years prior to the film’s release. Likely, it was the closest the Cold War came to Mutually Assured Destruction (MAD). It tipped the terrifying notion of total annihilation into tactile reality, and thus, the social, political and cultural trauma long-pervaded the air. 

Kubrick asks: Well, what do we do with that fear? What can we do when the world is ending, and we feel powerless to stop it? The movie answers him. We pay attention.

Strangelove sparked significant backlash in 1964. Critics lauded the farce for its being a farce. What? That would never happen! 

Could a general really permit the use of a nuclear weapon, sans approval from the President? Emphatically, no. ‘Nothing, in fact, could be further from the truth,’ stressed a former Deputy Secretary of Defence. 

As the public, of course, we know that the American military could, in fact, start a Third World war, despite the later introduction of increased safety measures. John F. Kennedy, weeks into his presidency, was told, in strict confidence, ‘a subordinate commander faced with a subordinate military action could start the thermonuclear holocaust on his own initiative if he could not reach you.’

The Doomsday Device is triggered, and Strangelove’s arm erects in an all-too familiar gesture, sexualised and absurd – it becomes abundantly clear the bad men never left in 1945. As Vera Lynn’s ‘We’ll Meet Again’ swings in a slow, sinister malaise over ghostly mushroom clouds, the end of all ends, the audience is left with all but dust. The ultimate horror grinded into dramatic satire. 

Obviously, the notion that a romantic song would play in this scenario is ridiculous. The lyrics, however, suggest a grim reality. We will meet again. This will not be the first time man shakes and is shaken by his own capacity for destruction. Again, human hubris will create advancements so vast that they can ultimately only be undone by silly, petty, trite power struggles.

You can catch Dr. Strangelove, as well as the other retrospectives, each day at 10:30am for free at GFT during Glasgow Film Festival which will take place from 25th February till 8th of March 2026.