Kathryn Bigelow has always been at her sharpest when she corrals national anxiety into procedural pressure cookers like The Hurt Locker and Zero Dark Thirty. A House of Dynamite aims for that same vein and, moment to moment, often finds the familiar pulse. The premise is brutally simple. An unattributed ICBM is streaking toward the United States, Chicago is in the crosshairs, and the government must decide what to do when the clock is melting and the culprit is unknown. Told in three interlocking viewpoints, the film tracks White House Situation Room captain Olivia Walker (Rebecca Ferguson), STRATCOM chief General Anthony Brady (Tracy Letts), and an unnamed President (Idris Elba) as they juggle conflicting intel, political cost, and raw fear.
Bigelow stages the crisis with immaculate control. Consoles glow, maps update in real time, jargon snaps like a metronome, and the 20 minutes until impact shrink with sickening speed. As pure craft, A House of Dynamite is tense as a wire. As a political thriller, it kept me leaned forward, especially in the first act where Ferguson gives the movie its spine. Olivia Walker is pragmatic, decisive, and the rare on-screen official who reads as a real operator rather than a mouthpiece. When the film drifts away from her, you feel it.
The trouble is what the movie refuses to commit to. The script holds back nearly everything that would give its themes teeth. We never learn who launched the missile, whether the warhead was real or a spoof, or what retaliatory path the President ultimately chooses. Ambiguity can be bracing when it reframes the moral stakes. Here it plays like a hedge. The film hints at a dozen ideas, from first-strike doctrine to the politics of misattribution, then lets them evaporate into tasteful ellipses. By the final reel, the withholding feels less like rigor and more like a smirk.
Performances keep it watchable. Ferguson is terrific, measured and flinty without bathing every line in self importance. Tracy Letts makes Brady’s brash certainty feel tragically human. Idris Elba invests the Commander in Chief with gravitas even as the screenplay turns him into a cipher for morality in its basic terms. Bigelow’s direction is never in doubt, which makes the hollowness of the script sting more. The movie invites comparisons to Oppenheimer and other nuclear panic dramas, but those films pair scale with specificity. A House of Dynamite offers scale without the same substance.
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If what you want is impeccably mounted doomsday procedure, this delivers on a scene-to-scene level. If you want a political thriller that actually lands a blow, it taps out when it matters most. A House of Dynamite proves Bigelow still knows exactly how to build pressure, then chooses to vent it into thin air.
Score: 5/10
A House of Dynamite (2025)
- 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
- Director: Kathryn Bigelow
- Genre: Drama, Thriller, War
- Runtime: 113 minutes
- Rated: R
- Release Date: October 24, 2025
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