A House of Dynamite (dir. Kathryn Bigelow)

by Jack Martin | Oct 24, 2025

Certificate: 15

Running Time: 112 mins

UK Distributor: Netflix

UK Release Date: 24 October 2025

WHO’S IN A HOUSE OF DYNAMITE?

Idris Elba, Rebecca Ferguson, Gabriel Basso, Jared Harris, Tracy Letts, Anthony Ramos, Moses Ingram, Jonah Hauer-King, Greta Lee, Jason Clarke, Willa Fitzgerald, Renée Elise Goldsberry, Kyle Allen, Kaitlyn Dever, Malachi Beasley, Brian Tee, Brittany O’Grady, Gbenga Akinnagbe, Francesca Carpanini, Abubakr Ali, Angel Reese

WHO’S BEHIND THE CAMERA?

Kathryn Bigelow (director, producer), Noah Oppenheim (writer, producer), Greg Shapiro (producer), Volker Bertelmann (composer), Barry Ackroyd (cinematographer), Kirk Baxter (editor)

WHAT’S IT ABOUT?

A nuclear missile is launched toward the United States…

WHAT ARE MY THOUGHTS ON A HOUSE OF DYNAMITE?

Kathryn Bigelow’s eight-year absence from filmmaking appears to have been more of an observational activity, for it seems she has spent that time away carefully looking at how woefully, almost hilariously unprepared modern society is for earth-shattering catastrophes, be it a global pandemic or the rise of right-wing extremism or war across Europe and the Middle East. With A House of Dynamite, she has now gathered everything she’s learned about our inefficiency for disaster and applied it to a what-if scenario concerning that most frightening of doomsday events: nuclear Armageddon.

As her film shows, if the unthinkable happens and nuclear missiles were launched with just minutes until entire cities are vapourised into nothingness, humanity will fumble the opportunity to stop it all rather than stepping up like Hollywood heroes of old. It’s a bleak outlook on a very plausible scenario, perhaps too much so for general audiences who will most likely come away with a feeling of deflation (though not exactly for the reasons you may think). But the solid filmmaking makes it an extremely gripping watch, even if it doesn’t quite add up to something wholly satisfying.

The film is told across three distinct chapters, each told in real time depicting the same event from multiple perspectives. Said event sees a nuclear missile of unknown origin being suddenly launched into sub-orbit, locked on a trajectory that will see it hit a major US city within twenty minutes. We see various government officials – including White House senior officer Olivia Walker (Rebecca Ferguson) who’s operating from the Situation Room; Anthony Brady (Tracy Letts), an army general based at the United States Strategic Command; Major Daniel Gonzalez (Anthony Ramos), a commander at a US Army post in Alaska that has access to missiles that can potentially eliminate the threat; and even the President of the United States (Idris Elba) who’s ultimately forced to come to a monumental decision about how to respond to the inevitable destruction.

Rather than simply adopt the standard Rashomon template, Bigelow and screenwriter Noah Oppenheim use the multiple perspectives to create a broader picture about the general ineffectiveness of humanity at a time when its very existence comes under threat. Each section in A House of Dynamite sees all these top-ranking officials respond in real time to something that could easily be preventable, except that the equipment they’re using to defend themselves has a strong chance of failure – a multi-million-dollar “coin toss”, as one character puts it – as well as the power-hungry egos that won’t consider a more radical resolution when said defence systems inevitably do backfire. While the film is never as outwardly comedic as, say, Don’t Look Up (and between these two films, this is definitely the better one, though Netflix really seems to have a fetish for releasing prestige pictures about incompetence causing the end of the world), you almost want to laugh at how badly a lot of these people are fumbling what should be a straightforward response to a nuclear attack, if it weren’t for the fact that it was all so deadly serious and, at times, seriously deadly.

Bigelow’s sharply observant direction is good at racking up tension as the minutes count down to the inevitable strike, always keeping you on edge as it leads towards a series of heated confrontations and even a couple of melodramatic turns that only make the scenario even more unbearable to absorb. Oppenheim’s script, meanwhile, eschews traditional character development and complex plotting simply because the premise does not have time to flesh any of these people or their backstories out, instead giving us a few tiny hints of who they are before seeing how they react to everything going on around them. Both director and writer respectively avoid the traditional pitfalls a narrative like this would normally be saddled with to tailor itself toward general audiences, and sometimes that can be a blessing and a curse. A blessing, in the sense that it really focuses hard on how, regardless of the effort being put in to try and bring down this threat, humanity just doesn’t have the strength or moral balance to properly prevent nuclear destruction in the modern age, a horrifying concept that feels all too timely when one considers the current political climate that is filled with heated aggression between powerful nations.

However, it’s also a curse in that A House of Dynamite never leads anywhere that audiences, general or otherwise, will be happy with. The stop-and-start nature of the separate segments – all beginning and ending at roughly the same point – keeps teasing a resolution that ultimately never arrives, with the film ending at a point where it feels like there’s a whole third act that is just missing, one that clears up not everything but at least a couple of the many pending questions. You can understand why the filmmakers went this anticlimactic route, for again their film is not designed to be a comfort watch with last-minute twists or bittersweet conclusions, but there’s a difference between maintaining ambiguity and flat-out denying viewers a sense of satisfaction in some form or another, causing people like myself to do the unthinkable and reference the infamous ending to The Devil Inside in the same sentence as a film by Oscar-winner Kathryn Bigelow.

At least there’s enough good stuff beforehand that makes the film just about worth watching, whether it’s the fierce tension or the strong performances, though that’s really what saves A House of Dynamite from going out with a whimper instead of a bang.

SO, TO SUM UP…

A House of Dynamite is a mostly solid thriller in which filmmaker Kathryn Bigelow closely explores the ineptitude of humanity in responding to a highly plausible destructive scenario with predominantly intense results, until it ends on a staggeringly anticlimactic note that almost undoes the tension it’s spent the preceding movie effortlessly building up.