A House of Dynamite

Original title:	A House of Dynamite
Director:	Kathryn Bigelow
Release:	Cinema
Running time:	112 minutes
Release date:	10 october 2025
Rating:

When a missile of unknown origin is launched at the United States, a race against time begins to determine who is responsible and how to respond.

Sabine's Review

Kathryn Bigelow comes back with this apocalyptic thriller, worthy of the best disaster movies. The premise is simple: a nuclear missile is launched toward the United States. American authorities must react within a very limited time, without being sure of the missile's origin. The film addresses a theme that has returned to the news: the nuclear threat in a tense world. Beyond the disaster movie, the film warns that any situation can get out of hand, despite the planned protocols. No one can anticipate everything. Human beings are then confronted with their powerlessness, their uncertainty, their responsibility. The message is serious, frightening, and relevant today.

Kathryn Bigelow relies on a brilliant screenplay written by Noah Oppenheim, a former journalist who is well-versed in politics and armed conflict (Zero Day, Divergent 3, The Maze Runner). The sequence of events is repeated three times, changing points of view and locations each time. Each point of view brings its share of revelations, reinforcing the tension and the complexity of the decisions to be made. Kathryn Bigelow maintains a constant tension throughout the film. She realistically recreates these political and military environments. The atmosphere of crisis, the stress, and the suppressed panic are very well rendered. The fact of not knowing who the enemy is, of maintaining uncertainty is an ingenious idea. The rythm is nervous. The 112 minutes pass quickly.

The casting is brilliant. Whether it's Rebecca Ferguson as a White House executive, Idris Elba as the president, or Anthony Ramos as a military man, all are credible in their parts. The characters aren't heroic in the classic sense. They have doubts, flaws. Their certainties waver. Kathryn Bigelow films as closely as possible to the characters. We are with them in this descent into hell. Special mention to Volker Bertelmann's music, which contributes to the film's tension, with its use of violins. A House of Dynamite is a successful disaster movie on a terribly topical subject.

A House of Dynamite
Directed by Kathryn Bigelow
Written by Noah Oppenheim
Produced by Greg Shapiro, Kathryn Bigelow, Noah Oppenheim
Starring Idris Elba, Rebecca Ferguson, Gabriel Basso, Jared Harris, Tracy Letts, Anthony Ramos, Moses Ingram, Jonah Hauer-King, Greta Lee, Jason Clarke
Cinematography: Barry Ackroyd
Edited by Kirk Baxter
Music by Volker Bertelmann
Production companies: First Light Pictures, Prologue Entertainment, Kingsgate Films
Distributed by Netflix
Release dates: September 2, 2025 (Venice), October 3, 2025 (United Kingdom), October 10, 2025 (United States), October 24, 2025 (France)
Running time: 112 minutes

Seen October 2, 2025 at the french Cinémathèque in Paris

Sabine's Mark:

Mulder's Review

With A House of Dynamite, Kathryn Bigelow returns to the tense and frightening genre of cinema that only she knows how to make, the kind that forces you to watch the unimaginable and challenges you not to blink. This is not a film that coddles its audience or offers catharsis. It is a waking nightmare, unfolding in real time and on a loop, as if the story itself were stuck in a loop. In collaboration with screenwriter Noah Oppenheim, Kathryn Bigelow transforms the idea of launching a single nuclear missile into an existential countdown, a political procedure, and ultimately a moral judgment on the thin line between stability and annihilation. It's a bold return to form—imperfect, certainly, but electrifying in its ambition and execution—and arguably one of the most provocative thrillers of the decade.

The premise is as simple as it is frightening: a missile of unknown origin is spotted in the Pacific, heading toward the United States with less than twenty minutes to impact. At first, everyone thinks it's a test, another false alarm in an era of cyber glitches and bellicose diplomacy. But as data pours in and the trajectory becomes clearer, the truth sets in like a disease: this is no exercise. In Alaska, Major Anthony Ramos leads the team that first detects the launch. In Washington, Captain Rebecca Ferguson runs the White House crisis room with impeccable professionalism and barely contained panic. A few rungs higher, a four-star general (Tracy Letts) and an exhausted Secretary of Defense (Jared Harris) try to reach the president, whose code name is “Icon,” who remains a faceless voice on a flickering screen until much later. Every word, every delay, every breath becomes precious. You can almost hear the clock ticking behind the dialogue: there are 19 minutes left before Chicago ceases to exist.

Kathryn Bigelow structures the film in three overlapping chapters, each replaying the same crisis from a different angle. It's a bold idea, halfway between Rashomon and Fail Safe, which amplifies the horror through repetition rather than spectacle. With each retelling, we see more of the machinery—both human and institutional—that is set in motion when the unimaginable happens. The first segment is purely procedural and urgent: flashing screens, acronyms galore, shouted orders. The second slows down to examine the politics of decision-making, focusing on Gabriel Basso as an anxious deputy advisor and Tracy Letts as an uncompromising general who clash over protocol and power. The third focuses on the president himself, played by Idris Elba, a reluctant leader who must choose between restraint and retaliation, between the survival of millions and the illusion of control.

What makes A House of Dynamite captivating is not the spectacle—there are no mushroom clouds, no lingering shots of destruction—but the unsettling realism of its bureaucratic chaos. Kathryn Bigelow films these war rooms and command centers with documentary precision, aided by Barry Ackroyd's handheld camera work and Kirk Baxter's jerky editing. The result is an atmosphere of procedural claustrophobia where everything feels authentic and horribly mundane. People fumble with their phones, argue over data streams, and cling to normality even as the world teeters on the brink of collapse. You can feel the physical stress in every frame, from Rebecca Ferguson's clenched jaw to Jared Harris's trembling hand when he realizes his daughter is in the blast zone.

What elevates the film beyond the trappings of a thriller is Kathryn Bigelow's refusal to indulge in easy heroism. No one here saves the day. No one even fully understands what is happening. These are competent, disciplined professionals doing their best in a system built on uncertainty. In this sense, A House of Dynamite is closer to The Hurt Locker than Zero Dark Thirty: it deals with the cost of control, the illusion of preparedness, and the human fragility that lies beneath the institutional armor. When Captain Walker, played by Rebecca Ferguson, clutches her child's stuffed dinosaur in a moment of helplessness, Kathryn Bigelow finds the image that defines the film: a relic of innocence in the shadow of extinction.

Yet despite all its tension, the film's looping structure also becomes its most controversial element. Each reset deepens the terror but slightly dilutes the momentum, trading immediacy for scope. Some viewers may find the repetition mechanical; others will see it as a formal masterstroke, reflecting the futility of response in a crisis with no way out. Kathryn Bigelow and Noah Oppenheim clearly intend it to be both: a cinematic echo chamber where every attempt to impose order only reveals how fragile that order is. When the president, played by Idris Elba, is confronted with the “menu” of retaliation options (“rare, medium, well done”), the absurdity of nuclear logic falls like the punchline of humanity's oldest and darkest joke.

A dark humor runs through the film, discreet but undeniable, reminiscent of Stanley Kubrick's Dr. Strangelove without being a parody. Tracy Letts, teeth clenched and authority stained with coffee, throws out sarcastic barbs that also serve as coping mechanisms. Greta Lee, as a distracted analyst answering calls from a civil war reenactment, embodies the surreal absurdity of modern warfare conducted via Wi-Fi and distraction. Even the jaded US president played by Idris Elba seems aware that history has turned into a farce, its gravity undermined by the grotesque weight of his responsibilities. The brilliant idea behind A House of Dynamite lies in the way it recognizes this: in 2025, the apocalypse is no longer cinematic, it is bureaucratic.

It is worth noting that this is Kathryn Bigelow's first purely speculative work in two decades, and it feels deeply personal. She is a child of the Cold War, someone who grew up in the shadow of duck and cover drills. The film's urgency stems from this generational anxiety, from the feeling that nuclear fear has become background noise, normalized to the point of invisibility. In interviews, she has described the film as a wake-up call, and that's exactly what it seems to be: a reminder that the machinery of destruction continues to hum quietly beneath our daily routines. The tension in the film never lets up, because it can't. The missile may never strike, but the detonator, metaphorically speaking, continues to burn.

A House of Dynamite stands out as a real success not because it is perfect, but because it is fearless. It is a film that rejects comfort and confronts the moral absurdity of power with the precision of a scalpel. Kathryn Bigelow transforms 19 minutes into an eternity, and therein lies her triumph: she forces us to sit inside this ticking clock, to feel time stretching and logic collapsing. In the end, she offers us neither explosion nor conclusion, only silence and the hum of systems that continue to function, waiting for the next signal. It is an ending that lingers like radiation, invisible but impossible to erase.

Seen on October 24, 2025 on Netflix

Mulder's Mark: