A House of Dynamite
Kathryn Bigelow delivers a chillingly credible but unsatisfactory drama examining a worst-case scenario.
End of the line: Rebecca Ferguson
Courtesy of Netflix.
It’s the most dramatic subject of all. And who better to harness such material than Kathryn Bigelow, the director of The Hurt Locker, Zero Dark Thirty and Detroit? Or, indeed, Noah Oppenheim, the scenarist who brought us the breath-grasping TV miniseries Zero Day in which America finds itself at the mercy of outside malign forces? Oppenheim returns to a similar end-of-days scenario set within the various pertinent offices should a nuclear attack be launched on the United States. Cold War thrillers have become a staple of Hollywood navel-gazing but even 61 years after Dr Strangelove (1964) and Fail Safe (1964), the world hardly feels much safer.
The unnamed President of the United States (Idris Elba), relates to his military aide about a podcast he heard recently: “This guy said, ‘it’s like we built a house filled with dynamite. Making all these bombs and all these plans, and the walls are just ready to blow. But we kept on living in it’.” It’s not a particularly eloquent metaphor for the current state of the world, but it’s picturesque. The same could be said for the escalation of global warming, the dangers of AI or the continued experimentation with biological warfare.
A House of Dynamite is divided into three parts, all set within the same time frame and featuring three overlapping characters, played by Gabriel Basso, Jared Harris and Tracy Letts. Basso, who portrayed J.D. Vance in Hillbilly Elegy, is the Deputy National Security Advisor whose workload is escalated when his superior proves unreachable. At the start, it’s a day like any other with a surprising optimism buzzing around the lives of the various personnel of governmental and military departments, such as the White House Situation Room, a military base in Alaska and the Federal Emergency Management Agency, all with an important part to play, apparently. Our nominal heroine, Olivia Walker (Rebecca Ferguson), who is seen comforting her young son at 3.30 the previous morning, appears surprisingly upbeat on so little sleep, but we already know that she is a good person. In fact, everybody is above par and you can smell the jolly camaraderie across five time zones.
Then, in the words of the combatant commander of the United States Strategic Command (Letts), someone has launched a “sophisticated coordinated assault that is only just beginning.” All this is disclosed in front of screens of various sizes, as the penny begins its descent. A foreign power has unleashed an unprecedented and unprovoked attack on the US and there’s precious little time or technical capability to discern who or why or what or even if it’s just an AI blip. What we do know is that the attack is seemingly unstoppable and that retaliation could make things irreparably worse.
Bigelow and Oppenheim don’t appear to be interested in the outcome but in how a superpower like the US behaves and operates under this sort of doomsday scenario. Private lives are lightly sketched in (Tracy Letts has a daughter in the line of fire), while the POTUS wrestles with his conscience. The latter is beautifully and charismatically played by Idris Elba, who seems far more comfortable in the Oval Office than he did in Downing Street in this summer’s Heads of State. And like every US president since Jimmy Carter, he is a very tall man. There are good turns, too, from Rebecca Ferguson, Tracy Letts and Greta Lee.
However, it’s only the first act, as the pieces start to fall into place, that is the most gripping, before the same situation starts to feel repetitive and the audience might feel that it has been cheated of a more decisive endgame. Inevitably, in the hands of Kathryn Bigelow, it all feels chillingly authentic and is perhaps a timely reminder of how damned stupid such nuclear sabre rattling is in a world that no longer seems to be able to control its cyber intelligence.
JAMES CAMERON-WILSON
Cast: Idris Elba, Rebecca Ferguson, Gabriel Basso, Jared Harris, Tracy Letts, Anthony Ramos, Moses Ingram, Jonah Hauer-King, Greta Lee, Jason Clarke, Malachi Beasley, Brian Tee, Brittany O'Grady, Gbenga Akinnagbe, Willa Fitzgerald, Renée Elise Goldsberry, Kyle Allen, Kaitlyn Dever, Angel Reese, Emily Chastain.
Dir Kathryn Bigelow, Pro Greg Shapiro, Kathryn Bigelow and Noah Oppenheim, Screenplay Noah Oppenheim, Ph Barry Ackroyd, Pro Des Jeremy Hindle, Ed Kirk Baxter, Music Volker Bertelmann, Costumes Sarah Edwards, Sound Paul N.J. Ottosson, Dialect coaches Susan Hegarty and Charlotte Fleck.
First Light/Prologue Entertainment/Kingsgate Films-Netflix.
112 mins. USA. 2025. UK and US Rel: 24 October 2025. Cert. 15.
