Review: A House of Dynamite (2025)

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It wasn’t long ago that a new Kathryn Bigelow movie would’ve been hotly anticipated and roundly celebrated. After all, Bigelow is the first woman to win Best Director—which she did for The Hurt Locker (2009)—and Zero Dark Thirty earned a Best Picture nomination as well as rave reviews. But times change, Bigelow’s ambiguous militaristic storytelling is no longer in vogue with liberal critics—as seen with her last film, Detroit (2017)—and her latest film, A House of Dynamite, was dumped unceremoniously on Netflix.

It doesn’t help that it’s her worst film in years. Bigelow is still a talented director, creating unbearable tension in the film’s gripping opening 30 minutes. But the script by Jonah Oppenheim is not on par with Bigelow’s abilities as a director, and so the film takes its shot early, much like the missile at the centre of the narrative, and then just coasts. The film fatally spends too much time retreading ground before leading to a truly unsatisfying conclusion.

A House of Dynamite imagines a nightmarish hypothetical. A nuclear warhead is detected en route to the continental USA. Military monitors missed its launch so they do not know who fired it. But they do know it’s going to hit a major American city. How do they respond? That’s the entire narrative thrust of the film. It cuts its narrative into thirds, first following the White House Situation Room team, then the United States Strategic Command (STRATCOM) and national security advisory team, and then finally the president alone. Only the first section works like gangbusters. 

The film starts at a nuclear monitoring base in Alaska. The sparse team detects the airborne missile and prepares an interceptor. We then jump to the White House where Rebecca Ferguson’s Situation Room duty officer Captain Liv Walker handles the room as they monitor the missile and coordinate the various responses across military and government, including STRATCOM, the Secretary of Defense (Jared Harris), and the President (Idris Elba). Liv is powerless in this situation as she’s not the person to make the decision, and therein lies the unbearable tension. When security officers arrive to escort high ranking officials to the bunker under the White House, the rest of the team is supposed to keep calm and keep doing their jobs even though they’ve been flagged as expendable by their own operating procedures. How do you keep calm in such a situation? More importantly, how do you make a rational decision?

Using on screen title cards and jumping between various government and military teams, Bigelow and Oppenheim explain much of the jargon specific to nuclear monitoring and response. Bigelow’s famously agile camera never stops moving, even if only subtly, as it watches the faces of these people dealing with the dreadful possibility of nuclear holocaust in real time. It helps immensely to have Ferguson at the centre of this sequence, as her ability to vacillate moment to moment between icy resolve and internal panic is essential to the emotional impact. It’s too bad, then, that the film jettisons her from the narrative and has nothing more to say over the following hour.

Right as the missile is about to hit, the film rewinds the clocks to show a different perspective. It’s the Rashomon approach, named for Akira Kurosawa’s seminal 1950 drama about a rape and murder trial told from three perspectives. But the key to Rashomon is that the details don’t match up. One person’s story contains elements that are absent from another’s. We don’t watch the same story three times, but three different stories purporting to describe the same event. A House of Dynamite just tells the same story three times from three different angles, but there’s no subjectivity at play here. The approach is used simply to fill us in on details only overhead or surmised during the opening sequence. Who is the Deputy National Security Advisor Jake Bareington (Gabriel Basso) talking to on the phone? Where is the President currently located? Who is this expert (Greta Lee) on North Korean nuclear technology who seems to be calling in from a battlefield? The subsequent sequences answer these questions, but the answers are inconsequential. The only question that we really care about after the opening third is: how is the USA going to respond?

Spoiler alert: the movie has no interest in answering this question. It cloaks its cowardice in ambiguity, refusing to give us a conclusion either devastating or miraculous. The result is that all we get in the first third is all we ever get: tension; impossible decisionmaking; people following convoluted operating structures against a ticking clock and lots of people petrified at the potential failure of their action.

But we get nothing more, no true illumination on the subject of nuclear war (you’d be better served reading Annie Jacobsen’s Nuclear War: A Scenario), no bitter condemnation of American impudence or even a full-throated cry that the mere existence of nuclear weapons is an abomination. Sure, elements of the film’s critical lens can be inferred, but the cop out of any grand statement makes it more a PSA than anything: wouldn’t it be bad if someone shot a nuke? So don’t do that. But like Ferguson’s Liv in the Situation Room, we don’t get to make that call. Only one man does and it’s unlikely Donald Trump is watching a Netflix movie while making war on Iran.

The film becomes a frustrating exercise in narrative castration. A House of Dynamite channels the ruthless ambiguity of Bigelow’s Zero Dark Thirty into a liberal treatise on tough political decisionmaking. It’s engaging, but ultimately disappointing, especially as it could have been so much more.

5 out of 10

A House of Dynamite (2025, USA)

Directed by Kathryn Bigelow; written by Noah Oppenheim; starring Idris Elba, Rebecca Ferguson, Gabriel Basso, Jared Harris, Tracy Letts, Anthony Ramos, Moses Ingram, Jonah Hauer-King, Greta Lee, Jason Clarke.

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