A House of Dynamite Review: A Popcorn Panic-Inducer

A House of Dynamite – Kathryn Bigelow’s return to the military and intelligence milieus of The Hurt Locker and Zero Dark Thirty, arguably her two most heralded films – opens with a text block contextualizing the Cold War and how superpowers came to a mutual understanding that the world is a much better place with fewer nukes in it. The stinger? “That era is over.” Oh Christ. Why not retitle this thing Panic Attack: The Movie and get it over with?

The bulk of A House of Dynamite tracks an incoming missile, origins unknown, on a warpath toward a major U.S. city. Jockeying between the White House Situation Room, FEMA, U.S. Strategic Command, Alaska’s Fort Greely, and other places you would and wouldn’t expect to be ground zero of a geopolitical crisis, the camera skitters, shifting an inch to the side like a bystander craning their neck for a different POV, or fast-zooming in and out, like somebody rocking on their heels – jittery, like everybody’s nerves here. As military leaders, politicians, and analysts brace for impact with only 19 minutes to go, the film unpacks in granular, fascinating detail the chain of command and series of decisions needing to be made, the moves and countermoves, the we-trained-for-this protocols and this-is-unprecedented dawning terror. 

And then… it does it again, twice more, hitting reset to experience that roughly one-third of an hour over again from a different vantage point. 

It’s a not-unclever organizational device by screenwriter Noah Oppenheim, a former head of NBC News who previously dabbled in farther-along dystopias in The Maze Runner and Divergent adaptations. There’s a lot to unpack in that first stretch – the frame is crowded with highly trained professionals speaking fast and in complicated jargon – and it’s not until the second and third replays that some of the nuances come into focus. (Bigelow has shrewdly stocked the cast with terrific actors, like Rebecca Ferguson and Tracy Letts, who know how to fill a frame with only a thumbnail sketch of character bio.) Still, the repetitive hook also means some of this business frankly gets a little tedious. And by the third go, when Idris Elba gets existential aboard Air Force One, you may think fondly of the terser earlier scenes. The speechifying isn’t bad, necessarily, but it feels, well, like a movie.

And that’s the rub with A House of Dynamite, which confounds narrative expectations, and marketing ones, too. It’s a dead-serious cautionary tale and sincere call for de-escalation, dressed like a political thriller by a director who’s aces with action (and whose actual best film, by the way, is Point Break). A House of Dynamite does not always easily straddle the gulf between docudrama and disaster movie conventions. Plunking one character at a Gettysburg battle enactment, the film slips in the tiniest metacommentary on war as entertainment; I wonder how that will land when it arrives on Netflix in two weeks and half the audience has one eye on folding laundry and doomscrolling. 

And we are in a doomy place, friends. (If there’s any salve for the film’s relentless stress, it’s in watching a White House staffed with clearly capable leaders.) These aren’t unprecedented times, exactly – after all, Fail Safe and Dr. Strangelove were both pop entertainments about the path to mutually assured destruction released at the height of the Cold War. Still, nobody would blame you for thinking: Shit’s stressful enough as is. Who has the stomach for this now?

Ahead of its Oct. 24 debut on Netflix, A House of Dynamite screens locally at IPIC Austin.

A House of Dynamite

2025, R, 112 min. Directed by Kathryn Bigelow. Starring Idris Elba, Rebecca Ferguson, Gabriel Basso, Jared Harris, Tracy Letts, Anthony Ramos, Moses Ingram, Jonah Hauer-King, Greta Lee, Jason Clarke.

⭐⭐⭐

Rating: 3 out of 5.

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