Eighteen minutes is all we have to save the country (or not) upon news of an impending nuclear missile in Kathryn Bigelow‘s horrifically gripping and cautionary “A House of Dynamite.” If we don’t do something about the lunatics in power globally, and specifically at the helm of nine countries with a nuclear stockpile (including the United States), well then, we’re fucked. Bigelow’s explosively entertaining real-time thriller, told from multiple perspectives at various levels of government from situation room deputies to POTUS (Idris Elba) himself, does not mince on hopelessness.
Here is a movie that will ruin your day. You’re welcome.
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Noah Oppenheim’s rigorously researched and vividly jargonistic script (he comes from a background in broadcast news at NBC) doesn’t mince, either, on the mundanity of incompetence. The filmmaking team visited the White House Situation Room and the headquarters of U.S. Strategic Command to achieve an almost whiplash-inducing realism: The pile-up of acronyms woven even into the film‘s intertitles — the GBIs, the KPAs, the JEEPS, and does it even matter what the hell they mean? — underlines how the United States’ all-scenarios plan of military response to a nuclear attack is futile in the wake of an actual missile heading toward either Louisville, Chicago, Columbus, or best-guess somewhere else in the Midwest.
Senior situation room duty officer Olivia Walker (Rebecca Ferguson) is having a normal day until U.S. intelligence reveals a likely nuclear object hurtling toward America. The film never identifies the missile’s source, though hotshot deputy national security advisor Jake Baerington is tasked with brokering peace with Russia and a promise not to retaliate if the U.S. government is forced to attack another nuclear-armed nation preemptively — and on a phone call in which he reveals his wife is six months pregnant. Everyone has something or someone to lose here, including Jared Harris as Secretary of Defense Reid Baker, who’s got an estranged daughter (Kaitlyn Dever) in Chicago who he knows is going to die.
Then, there’s Elba as the coolly serene president, who is ripped out of a PR-boosting photo opp with schoolchildren by his security details in a moment that eerily recalls George Bush being whispered to while reading “The Pet Goat” to a class of second-graders on September 11. Tracy Letts is having a whale of a time playing an almost somnambulant general who, eyes and spirit glazed over ahead of a wall of monitors displaying only bad news, matter-of-factly tells the president, “This is not insanity. It’s reality.” He says something about the “dual phenomenology” of the attack — whatever that means, but it evidently has something to do with being confirmed by both satellite and ground intelligence before a retaliation rather than with the philosophies of Edmund Husserl — with a sardonic bemusement typical of the actor and playwright. He’s capable of elevating any project he’s in and is a standout here.
Cinematographer Barry Ackroyd’s camera zigs like a documentary rig, with crash zooms on stunted faces and, combined with the talky verisimilitude of a script that amplifies the inherent ridiculousness of red-tape protocol, “A House of Dynamite” sometimes feels like a horror movie version of television’s “Veep.” Bigelow’s work is procedural to its core, and that this film is a speculative what-if is made all the more horrifying because of its banality.
“Surrender or suicide” is basically one of the unfortunate calls to action in a portfolio of doomsday scenarios POTUS likens to a diner menu: There are three options — “rare, medium, and well-done,” Jonah Hauer-King’s lieutenant commander Robert Reeves tells him — and none are good. The first lady, meanwhile, is on a safari in Africa and hard to pin down, and a moment where POTUS’ phone call with her drops out as 18 minutes turn into four and even fewer is one of an arsenal of devastating hammers Bigelow drops on you. One attempt to stop the missile spectacularly bombs, like a bullet hitting a bullet, as the military tries to intercept the missile with its own, Baker incensed by the failure of a $50-billion coin toss to land heads up.
“A House of Dynamite” moves at a whirring gradient with the ever-widening ensemble — which includes Greta Lee, Jason Clarke, and Moses Ingram as various cogs — that can be challenging to keep track of. The film essentially takes place entirely within an under-20-minute timeline, showing the same events from a shuffling deck of points of view. Bigelow’s grindingly focused direction is peerless here, with her already established as a frank and fearless chronicler of American political ambiguity in films like “The Hurt Locker” and “Zero Dark Thirty,” with “A House of Dynamite” seemingly completing a trilogy about the collapse of the American dream in war times.
Both those films wrapped on woundingly open-ended notes, with an Iraq War veteran ambivalently marching off into another tour of duty in “The Hurt Locker” and a CIA analyst breaking down in her military transport after leading the manhunt to catch and kill Osama Bin Laden in “Zero Dark Thirty.” “A House of Dynamite” similarly ends without finishing the sentence, not with a bang or “Melancholia”-level explosion, but in silence. What happens if we stay silent?
Hardly mere agitprop due to the stylistic intensity of its filmmaking, this gun-to-your-head engrossing movie — with its eardrum-piercing and death-rattling sound design and a score by Volker Bertelmann so oppressive it could swallow you whole — also wants to shake you out of your slumber with a cataclysmic whisper of an ending. We used to duck under our desks to rehearse surviving a nuclear annihilation; now, we only duck our heads in the sand we keep shoveling over ourselves. You can’t stop what’s coming, and what’s coming is worse than you thought.
Grade: A-
“A House of Dynamite” premiered at the 2025 Venice Film Festival. Netflix releases the film on Friday, October 10.
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