It must be addictive, weighing in on geopolitical reality using a cinema-sized canvas, especially when so many of your peers focus on period pieces or surrender to franchises. Kathryn Bigelow made her bones in genre work like Near Dark and Point Break, but won her Oscar for the harrowing, adrenalized push-pull of The Hurt Locker, one of the only Iraq War dramas to resonate culturally. Since then, she’s taken her Academy-conferred responsibility seriously with reality-based thrillers like Zero Dark Thirty and Detroit. A House Of Dynamite nudges her back towards fiction, but only slightly; it’s got a premise designed to chase its entertainment value with a sick feeling of dread. The movie opens with a nuclear missile heading toward the United States, and that’s not an action-picture jumping-off point; it’s the whole movie. Professionals at various levels respond to this imminent crisis, wondering with just as much anxiety as the audience whether they might avert disaster, or at least global nuclear war.
At first, Bigelow plays a clever game with runtime-based expectations; at some point early on, a countdown clock reaches a point where, if a global apocalypse arrives on time, the movie will quickly turn into a short subject. It turns out that A House Of Dynamite will reach its ultimate crisis point three times, exploring the bustle of sweaty reaction with overlapping characters. (Sometimes the audience watches different sides of a Zoom call, filling in previously unseen details.) The movie starts with Olivia Walker (Rebecca Ferguson), an intelligence analyst, spending a lot of time in her particular command center; the film also jumps into the offices of Defense Secretary Reid Baker (Jared Harris); Cathy Rogers (Moses Ingram), a FEMA official and designated evacuee in the case of an emergency; and youngish National Security Advisor Jake Baerington (Gabriel Basso), though the latter doesn’t have an office so much as a cell phone and whatever room he has to rush into.
Much of this is gripping, for obvious reasons. Eventually, some of it is also a little bit stupid. At the very least, there’s a weirdly Netflix-like vibe to the way A House Of Dynamite will occasionally reveal a late-arriving celebrity in a supporting role with the “why, it’s so-and-so!” panache of a starry 1960s ensemble comedy. This includes the role of the president; the fact that there’s a spoiler-teasing sense to Idris Elba turning up as commander-in-chief for the last 40 minutes of the movie (after spending the first two-thirds as a camera-off black box on Zoom), doesn’t bode well for this movie’s supposed seriousness.
Some of this narrative slapdashery is the point. A House Of Dynamite is most effective at speculating around just how off-balance this kind of scenario would catch the government—not for lack of training or forethought, but simply with the sheer difficulties of making the right calls at the right time and having them actually come out as planned. (Someone memorably describes the strategy of deflecting an inbound missile as akin to stopping “a bullet with a bullet.”) That’s the adjustment viewers witness, largely through Ferguson’s eyes, in the movie’s first segment. No one is dropping the ball, exactly, but our limitations as a global superpower quickly materialize. Ferguson providing the no-nonsense magnetism in these scenes, however, also draws out another comparison: This scenario is essentially a climactic moment in a recent Mission: Impossible sequel.
Despite Bigelow’s by now well-practiced way with control-room immediacy and the material’s avoidance of easy-relief endings, there’s still a lingering sense of Hollywood in the air, perhaps exacerbated by Today show producer Noah Oppenheim handling the screenwriting. Moreover, for all of the movie’s chilling, sobering depiction of how easily we could trip into global annihilation, its depiction of flawed professionalism and reasoned (if panicked) debates feels woefully outdated in 2025. Obviously a what-if scenario about a nuclear missile doesn’t have any obligation to root itself in the exact moment of its release. On the other hand, having a president who admits he doesn’t have all the answers but understands how swiftly he needs to act—having a president who appears, by virtue of Elba’s charisma and humanity, capable of remorse—seems increasingly like a Hollywood-level fantasy, one that accidentally turns A House Of Dynamite into an ungainly combination of existential panic and Sorkin-adjacent grandstanding. In other words, a grim best-case scenario on a tangent from the grimmer reality.
This makes it all the more discordant when A House Of Dynamite builds to such a light splat of an ending. It’s not just where the movie leaves off but how: On a series of shots that seem indifferently, even arbitrarily selected, building on a series of Bigelow’s decreasingly memorable images. The movie’s festival berth indicates a certain level of artistic ambition. But Bigelow’s greatest artistry has more often been in the visceral, not the political—her sci-fi thriller Strange Days remains one of her best—and despite some white-knuckle moments, Dynamite slackens with each runthrough of its perma-climactic 15 minutes. In the world of global catastrophes, Bigelow increasingly resembles an unwitting tourist, just like the rest of us.
Director: Kathyrn Bigelow
Writer: Noah Oppenheim
Starring: Rebecca Ferguson, Gabriel Basso, Jared Harris, Idris Elba, Jason Clarke, Moses Ingram, Greta Lee
Release Date: October 10, 2025; October 24, 2025 (Netflix)
