A House of Dynamite

Released 2025. Director: Kathryn Bigelow

IF TOM CLANCY AND JAMES PATTERSON HAD A LOVE CHILD, this would be it. A House of Dynamite is a taut political thriller played out on the various levels of commands and operations in the deployment of nuclear arsenal. It’s a cinematic equivalent of a page-turner built on urgent dialogues on the phone and on video screens among people who strategise if you live or die.

A nuclear missile from an unknown foreign adversary is heading for America with less than 18 minutes before impact. The fate of the country, even the world, is hanging by a thread. Get ready to bite some finger nails.

It’s fair to say that the intricacies of modern warfare and its impact on the people involved is the specialty of Kathryn Bigelow. The Hurt Locker is an intense contemplation on the effects of war on one man’s psyche against the backdrop of frontline bomb defusing which rightly won Bigelow an Oscar for Best Director, the first woman to do so. She followed up with another meticulous study of the assassination of Osama Bin Laden in Zero Dark Thirty focusing on a CIA agent who relies more on her own intelligence than espionage.

This time, working from a script by Noah Oppenheim, Bigelow shifts, folds and flips the same hypothetical scenario in A House of Dynamite. We see Rebecca Ferguson takes command of the White House Situation Room trying to save the country even as she’s certain she’ll never see her husband and child again. We see Anthony Ramos and his team at the Alaskan missile base firing a failed interceptor, losing the one chance to neutralise the threat. Then there’s Gabriel Basso as deputy national security adviser in an urgent call with the Russians to ascertain the origin of the missile. We also see Jared Harris as Secretary of Defense as he realises we’re heading for Armageddon, Tracy Letts as a hawkish general pushing for an all-out nuclear retaliation against friends and foes alike. Finally we see Idris Elba as the President pushed against the wall to decide if the world would blow up in a series of mushroom clouds.

The 18-minute window is not a lot a time when millions of lives are at stake. And when the same period is stretched to two hours experienced from different angles it doesn’t always sustain the same level of tension. Nevertheless Bigelow maintains the urgency and when your mind clicks into the rhythm of the split-second edit and you start to grasp a holistic view, that’s when you feel a rising tension towards the fist-clenching final moment when the scene goes to black.

The complexity of the response mechanism is both frustrating and necessary, giving A House of Dynamite an impatient and energetic flow, at times accelerated by Volker Bertelmann’s score of alarming strings (which sounds conspicuously recycled from his soundtrack for Conclave last year). There’s a feeling you’re heading into a gathering storm, rushed by a momentum towards a single point of inevitability as the clock keeps counting down.

The ending will be a disappointment if you approach this as a conventional political thriller because it isn’t. A House of Dynamite is a moral thriller about human response in the complicated chain of command in nuclear warfare. It’s an anxious view of the nature of power, political ethics and responsibilities. Few decisions, if any, have the power to seal the fate of humanity as when the President’s finger hovers over the nuclear button, as it were. As America is poised to resume nuclear weapons testing, the uncannily coincidental timing of the movie’s release has only heightened its sobering ending.

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