A House of Dynamite (United States, 2025)

Taut, relentless, and uncompromising, A House of Dynamite’s greatest strength is its sense of plausibility. Stripped bare of a Hollywood ending, some will find the film’s trajectory grim and unsatisfying. Indeed, there really isn’t an ending at all because this movie isn’t about what comes next but what comes before. It’s about moments lived on the razor’s edge where choices can’t be unmade and actions can’t be undone. To be fair, much of what percolates to the surface in Noah Oppenheim’s screenplay is pure speculation. Yet the precision of so many details makes this one of the most realistic depictions of impending Armageddon since Sydney Lumet’s Fail Safe, serving as a serious counterpoint to Stanley Kubrick’s blisteringly satirical take on similar material, Dr. Strangelove.

There are some issues. The most obvious is that there are too many secondary characters with almost nothing to do except clog up the screen and extend the running time. Pacing is also an issue. Divided into three acts that repeat the same time period (albeit with different perspectives), the film fails to achieve the high peak of its first act during the two that follow. Still, the movie unnerves as we observe the inability of trusted officials to cope and recognize how delicate the balance of MAD is when someone puts their thumb on the scales.

The movie concludes with almost every major question left unanswered. Oppenheim and director Kathryn Bigelow aren’t interested in continuing the story past a certain point. Viewers will wrestle not only with what will happen next but also what should happen next. This ambiguity isn’t an attempt to tease a sequel; it’s an artistic choice. Some will hate the movie because of it. Others will recognize that there’s simply no way to extend the narrative beyond this point without expending more time than could plausibly be given in anything less than a full-blown TV series.

A House of Dynamite’s first act is its most harrowing. On a normal July day, people are doing normal things. At Fort Greely, Alaska, base commander Major Daniel Gonzalez (Anthony Ramos) and his subordinates are joking around when they note the flight of a previously undetected ICBM over the western Pacific. Initially, they think it’s just another North Korean test missile – something worth monitoring but otherwise not alarming. In Washington, Captain Olivia Walker (Rebecca Ferguson) arrives at work in the White House Situation Room thinking this will be just another day – more concerned about her ill son than anything in the sky. Secretary of Defense Reid Baker (Jared Harris) is playing golf. The President (Idris Elba) is getting ready to speak in front of a school assembly. And General Anthony Brady (Tracy Letts), a senior STRATCOM officer, is talking about the performance of Francisco Lindor in the previous night’s MLB All-Star game.

Then everything changes. The seemingly harmless missile doesn’t follow the expected trajectory. Instead, it goes suborbital and projects an impact on the continental U.S. The precise target emerges: Chicago, the nation’s third most-populous city. And there are only 18 minutes left – not enough time to prepare or evacuate. All hopes are pinned on the $50B anti-missile defense system (which one character refers to as hitting one bullet with another bullet) while the President contemplates retaliation options even though the identity of the perpetrator remains unknown.

For the movie’s first 40 minutes, Bigelow harnesses the same degree of white-knuckle tension that was the hallmark of her Oscar-winning The Hurt Locker. However, when the movie decides to move forward by repeating the same time period with (mostly) different characters, it spins its wheels a little. There are enough new wrinkles and different points-of-view to make the second and third acts gripping, but few would debate that the film ever again achieves the heights of its first third.

By keeping everything tightly scripted and focusing almost exclusively on being “in the moment,” the movie avoids anything resembling partisanship. We learn nothing about the President’s policies or how the public perceives him. Aside from the fact that his wife (Renee Elise Goldsberry) is on a safari in Kenya and he has bad knees, personal details are few and far between. The decision to completely de-politicize A House of Dynamite allows it to avoid distractions. Still, the movie might have been better had it trimmed the number of characters and focused more deeply on some of the key ones. I would have liked to see more of Captain Walker, for example, who never appears after the end of Act One.

Existential questions linger once the end credits have rolled. When a frazzled Deputy National Security Advisor Jake Baerington (Gabriel Basso) advises against retaliation, the President counters that to do nothing amounts to surrendering. Baerington’s response: It’s “surrender or suicide.” That chilling rejoinder puts into perspective the recognition of how different the rules of engagement are in a nuclear era. Living in a DEFCON 4 world, we conveniently ignore the Sword of Damocles that hangs above our fragile reality. A House of Dynamite serves as a pulse-pounding, deeply unsettling reminder.

A House of Dynamite (United States, 2025)