Film Review – A House of Dynamite

October 23rd, 2025 | POSTED BY Allen Almachar

***Warning: This Review Contains Spoilers***

Kathryn Bigelow – the Oscar-winning director of The Hurt Locker (2008) and Zero Dark Thirty (2012) – has returned with another political thriller, A House of Dynamite (2025). Along with writer Noah Oppenheim, Bigelow imagines a scenario in which a nuclear missile has been launched at the U.S., and all the immediate responses to it. The result is a collage of several perspectives, from the top of the government chain all the way down. Each level grapples with the reality that a major U.S. city is minutes away from being wiped off the map. Bigelow has earned her reputation for constructing tense, suspenseful narratives, and this is no different. However, a huge misstep is taken once all the storylines are tied (or not tied) together. We’ll discuss that in a minute.

Taking a page out of Rashomon (1950), the plot is separated into three parallel viewpoints, each one detailing the government and military reactions when an unidentified missile is spotted heading towards U.S. soil. Who fired it? Where did it come from? Radar systems indicate the rocket’s trajectory pointing directly at Chicago.  Why that city in particular? How should the U.S. respond? The situation becomes more dire when American missiles are fired in hopes of intercepting the nuke in the air but fail. If the U.S. sits back and waits for more intel on the missile’s origins, it could be perceived as being weak and indecisive. If the President orders to fire back at America’s enemies, it would likely spark a world war that would result in countless lives lost. 

Each of the three parts starts at the discovery of the missile and follows several key characters. The first section features Captain Olivia Walker (Rebecca Ferguson), lead officer at The White House situation room, as well as Major Daniel Gonzalez (Anthony Ramos), who commands the security outpost that fired the interceptor rockets. The second part examines the opposite perspectives regarding the appropriate U.S. response. General Anthony Brady (Tracy Letts) believes the military should strike potential enemies to prevent any further attacks. In contrast, Deputy National Security Advisor Jake Baerington (Gabriel Basso) argues that retaliation should be paused in favor of diplomatic de-escalation. All these moving gears revolve around the third section, in which the President of the United States (Idris Elba) must make a difficult decision. It’s a lose/lose situation for him, as he comes to the realization that whatever he chooses will result in death – it’s only a matter of which choice will lead to the least amount of it.

It might be hard for younger people to believe that during the Cold War, the threat of nuclear annihilation was an everyday reality. Schools had kids run drills in the event of an attack. The paranoia over communism led to the “Red Scare,” in which countless Americans were arrested and prosecuted, often unjustifiably. And of course, we can’t forget the Cuban Missile Crisis, which was the closest America ever came to real nuclear conflict. This history – as well as the state of current affairs – adds an extra layer of weight all throughout A House of Dynamite. Bigelow has always been great at creating tension, and in large portions here the suspense is palpable. The editing (Kirk Baxter) and cinematography (Barry Ackroyd) routinely cuts between computer screens tracking the missile and facial reactions highlighting the magnitude of the danger. The hand-held camerawork creates an immediate, real-time atmosphere, as though we are placed right alongside the characters.

The writing ramps up the urgency by stating that the missile has only 17 minutes before it hits its target. With each passing second, the sense of impending doom escalates. Because the narrative unfolds within a short span of time, we don’t get much opportunity to know the characters. We do get small bits that allow them to be more than just cogs within the machine. When we first meet Olivia Walker, she is in the middle of saying goodbye to her family before she heads to the White House. The same can’t be said for Major Gonzalez, where an early phone call hints at a potential marital strife. General Brady is a sports fanatic who can’t stop talking about baseball, and we learn that the President’s wife (Renée Elie Goldsberry) is currently on safari in Africa. Because there is such limited time, periphery characters – such as intelligence officer Ana Park (Greta Lee) and FEMA official Cathy Rogers (Moses Ingram) – are relegated to near cameo appearances. They come in, provide exposition that emphasizes the severity of the nuke, and then are promptly swept aside.

***Major Spoilers Follow. You Have Been Warned***

For all the good A House of Dynamite contains in its storytelling, it betrays itself with a massive flaw in its ending. The flaw is: it doesn’t have an ending. The writing/directing chooses to stop the story in midstream, with no resolution to any of the story threads. We don’t know what the President decides to do, we don’t know what becomes of any of the characters, and we don’t know if the bomb detonates or if it is stopped at the last second. The screen just cuts to black and the credits roll. This decision undermines everything that came before, leaving us with a feeling of incompletion. Don’t get me wrong: I don’t mind movies that end on an ambiguous note – sometimes that is preferred. But there must be a sense that the filmmakers said everything they wanted to say – that the themes are translated effectively even if we are left with lingering questions. That is not the case here. The ending is so abrupt that it makes us wonder if the production had trouble finding an appropriate closing point and opted to just stop dead in their tracks. Whatever themes or messages there are disappear in a blink of an eye, because the ending lacks conviction. 

In comparison, Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb (1964) might very well be the greatest examination of the Cold War and nuclear fallout precisely because it doesn’t shy away from its ending. The shot of Slim Pickens riding the hydrogen bomb like a cowboy, followed by a montage of mushroom cloud explosions, perfectly satirizes how humanity has come so close to destroying itself. The same can be said about the final scene of Oppenheimer (2023), where the title character faces the gravity of what he helped create. Is it unfair to compare such critically acclaimed works to A House of Dynamite? Perhaps. But when you have a director of such high caliber like Kathryn Bigelow, we would hope that the result would follow through to a more logical conclusion – regardless of whether it is bleak or optimistic. In this case, the film hesitates getting there.

A House of Dynamite is a decent thriller through two thirds of its runtime. However, the final act – especially the last few seconds – leaves us on a sour note. This is one of those rare occasions where the writing and direction sabotages itself. You know something went terribly wrong when we walk out of a film thinking less about what it is saying and more about how it says it.

A House of Dynamite, Anthony Ramos, Barry Ackroyd, Dr. Strangelove, Featured, Gabriel Basso, Greta Lee, Idris Elba, Kathryn Bigelow, Kirk Baxter, Moses Ingram, Noah Oppenheim, Oppenheimer, Rashomon, Rebecca Ferguson, Renée Elise Goldsberry, Slim Pickens, The Hurt Locker, Tracy Letts, Zero Dark Thirty