Review: Geopolitical thriller ‘A House of Dynamite’ is as captivating as it is frustrating
2025 / Dir. Kathryn Bigelow
☆ 3/5
Watch if you like: The Hurt Locker, Margin Call, and getting stuck in a waiting room and your phone is dead so you have to watch cable news for hours until you lose your mind listening to different pundits repeat the same talking points over and over again forever.
In Kathryn Bigelow’s new subversive thriller, a who’s who of notable character actors try to prevent a nuclear warhead from blowing up Chicago, hampered by the limited reach of government bureaucracy. The white-knuckled beginning is bound to be one of the most anxiety-inducing sequences of the year, but the film’s structure and sure-to-be-divisive ending make Dynamite as infuriating as it is captivating.
After an Alaskan military base spots an ICBM nuclear missile headed toward the U.S. from an indeterminate origin in the Pacific, A House of Dynamite begins bouncing between the military base, FEMA, the White House Briefing Room, and the White House Situation Room, involving a mix of bureaucrats, military personnel, and intelligence officials. With less than twenty minutes until the missile may potentially wipe out Chicago, we race through questions about which of the many contemporary hostile foreign entities may have attacked us, what our options are for deterrence, and, most frightening, whether the United States should preemptively strike back against all our perceived enemies to prevent any potential incoming strikes.
Unfolding in real time, this initial section is absolutely horrifying. For every intelligent character like Rebecca Ferguson’s Captain Olivia Walker, who deftly commands the Situation Room, there’s a bureaucratic process that wastes time, a cabinet member undergoing surgery, a president out of pocket, or a mechanical failure. Even a shaky internet connection, with minutes to doomsday, creates another pit in your stomach.
Bigelow’s message is blunt but effective: we live under an illusion of security where there’s no way for a functioning government to actually protect us if we continue to live in a world with nuclear weapons. This first section is tense, terrifying, and incredibly effective. I found it absolutely devastating as a Chicagoan to watch this in a screening downtown, particularly during an unbearably tense moment where masked federal agents descend on our city.
Unfortunately, A House of Dynamite isn’t a short film, and the method of stretching a 20-minute sequence into a feature-length film is to revisit the same event from multiple perspectives. In the middle, we return to the start and expand on some of the other characters who were previously seen as talking heads in a Zoom window in the first sequence. That includes Jake Baerington (Gabriel Basso), a Deputy National Security Advisor filling in for his boss, who happens to be late at work. Tracy Letts is a general pushing for maximum destruction against America’s enemies. At the same time, Baerington, one of the few urging calm, struggles through a bad connection and gets stuck in a security line.
The tension does build up again, to a lesser extent, but by the third time we do this, it’s gone. Now focusing on Jared Harris’s Secretary of Defense and Idris Elba as the President, we get some of the same dialogue repeated for the third time without anything new added. The point of this structure is perhaps to counteract audience expectations for a single brave hero to save the day, yet by undercutting the tension, it raises questions about the purpose of characters like Moses Ingram’s FEMA officer, Cathy Rogers, who are introduced and quickly disappear.
Barry Ackroyd’s cinematography also suffers, becoming increasingly frustrating as we’re forced to revisit the same timeline repeatedly. Although most of this film features people on phones and computers, it’s shot like The Bourne Identity, with tons of jerky, handheld camerawork and rapid editing. The idea seems to be to create a surveillance documentary look to drum up the realism; in reality, you’re either going to succumb to motion sickness or roll your eyes after seeing the camera arbitrarily move around, or do the same rapid micro-zoom in and out that happens over and over again.
Kathryn Bigelow and screenwriter Noah Oppenheim (Jackie)’s message in A House of Dynamite is desperately vital in a world of increasing instability and strife, and its first third showcases the work of an excellent director. While very watchable, the movie’s frustrating decision to repeat the same events from slightly different perspectives provides diminishing returns and an ending that left me actually throwing my hands in the air in disbelief, neutering what could have been another masterpiece.