New York Film Festival 2025

Kathryn Bigelow’s first feature in eight years is a radical departure from her previous military films — Best Picture winner The Hurt Locker and Bin Laden hunt chronicle Zero Dark Thirty — though it’s hard to say if she knows this. A House of Dynamite is a junk food thriller in the body of a prestige drama. It grasps at symbolism and profundity to the point of shooting itself in the foot, but the ricochet from this gunfire is thrilling on its own, and ensures the film is rollicking good time for just long enough.

What seems like just another day for the U.S. intelligence apparatus goes sideways, inside out, and upside down when a nuclear warhead is mysteriously launched toward American shores from somewhere in the Pacific. The culprit could be any one of the country’s known nuclear adversaries, resulting in a surprisingly entertaining geopolitical whodunnit, as every head-of-department (and a very fed up POTUS, played by Idris Elba) tries to formulate a response in the 19 minutes before impact, a timeline the film re-visits from several points of view.

Penned by former NBC producer Noah Oppenheim, A House of Dynamite is conceptually ludicrous, even though it purports to be a detailed analysis of threat response à la War Game, the recent coup d’état simulation doc. The film goes to great lengths to explain the many acronyms the characters use during the crisis, but all that technical minutiae is likely to go in one ear and out the other, for no other reason than the human drama is significantly more engrossing. As characters played by powerhouse performers pour into various war rooms — the likes of Tracy Letts, Jared Harris and Rebecca Ferguson imbue things with a somber sense of occasion — portraits of past Presidents and even the famous photograph of Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton eagerly monitoring Seal Team Six loom mournfully over the unfolding chaos, peeking over shoulders like angels and devils urging people make decisions, and make them quickly. It’s amusingly overt, but given the urgency at play, informs the intense moral dilemmas in all the right ways. 

Bigelow’s view of the United States in A House of Dynamite is one of dashed idealism, where even a popular and charismatic Black leader in the vein of Obama flounders at the mercy of crumbling systems and infrastructure, with generals poisoning his ear with blame for China, Russia, Iran, North Korea, and so forth. Any one of them could be the responsible, or none of them, and it’s on Elba’s nameless President to potentially launch a “retaliatory” strike that is, in reality, a desperate show of pre-emptive force before the rogue nuke even touches down.

Phones ring constantly, as information pops up on an infinite array of screens, appearing faster than the eye can process, but just slow enough that the imagination can assemble them into something coherent. The situation is, to quote another famous meditation on American power, “9/11 times a hundred,” with cinematographer Barry Ackroyd’s unpredictable, free-flowing, documentarian camera capturing the mile-a-minute intensity through crash zooms and claustrophobic frames. However, what’s both unexpected (and rather fitting) about the movie is its oddball chronology, which sees groups of characters scrambling to act right up until a vital climactic moment — at which point the timeline resets, and we witness these events from the perspective of an entirely different set of leaders, not once, but multiple over. This structure helps spread the wealth of great performances so they aren’t trampling on each other, but it also leads to numerous disappointments, since the movie cuts or fades to black at its most interesting moments. 

The white-knuckle thrills of the film’s initial act helps build intrigue when this first happens, but with each timeline reset comes diminishing returns, as it becomes clear the story is going to keep yanking back instead of delivering the goods. Generally, a film that leaves its answers up to interpretation ought to, at least in theory, provide enough by way of suggestion as to what viewers should be left thinking or feeling, but these gestures stop short of the raw violence and chaos that might make such reflections affecting and worthwhile. 

This cinematic edging is made even more frustrating by the actual connections between the movie’s timelines, which are, at all times, connected by a video conference call. When lines of dialogue repeat from someone else’s vantage, the situations therein are revealed to have surprising context, but not in ways that directly impact the central conundrum. Why is the President taking so long to respond? Because, it turns out, he’s on another phone call. Why did Jared Harris’ Secretary of Defense temporarily mute his microphone? Because he’s on another call as well. Who is Tracy Letts’ STRATCOM general having a side conversation with? Oh, you know, just some guy. The answers will always surprise you, but only in their workaday mundanity. A House of Dynamite is a film of meticulous process, and of people being distracted from that process, but this allows it to remain grounded in relatable concerns, despite its above-our-pay-grades premise.

There’s a ton of humanity to be found amidst the bombast, especially from the engineers and soldiers further down the totem pole, who are forced to act on orders without question, and quickly become the movie’s emotional core. Aminah Nieves’ minor military officer, despite being confined to a control room, captures the apocalyptic stakes of the situation through her increasingly distraught expression. Anthony Ramos plays a young commander tasked with launching interceptor missiles, who begins the movie distracted by woes in his personal life that we never fully learn about, but his state of mind informs each decision and interaction in lucid ways. The movie seldom provides answers to any of the details it hints towards; even its the outcomes of its nuclear plot are vague to the point of annoyance, despite Bigelow’s attempts to craft thought-provoking denouements. But at the end of the day, you truly get what she’s attempting with her exposé of the fragility of the American empire, a country whose wistfulness for its symbols and grandeur will ultimately not save it when the chips are down.

A House of Dynamite is also much funnier than the many of the people making it seem to realize. Perhaps Volker Bertelmann is one of the few in the know; for instance, he pulls from his booming score for Conclave, one of the pulpiest modern dramas about modern power and succession. Bigelow and Oppenheim, on the more serious side of things, go as far as setting an important life-or-death phone call against a cacophonous Civil War re-enactment. The dramatic irony is side-splitting, not because of the mournful shots of medics tending to fake wounds, and flags morosely wilting in the wind, but in spite of these things. There’s a tangible history of suffering and internal conflict the movie tries to draw from (to say nothing of its limp gestures towards the oncoming climate crisis via shots of news broadcasts), but all of this becomes utterly futile when the gargantuan power of a nuclear weapon literally looms overhead. It’s hilariously nihilistic, whether or not it means to be. Nothing matters — certainly not the patriotism one holds dear. 

Despite the movie’s self-important tone, its closest cousins are popcorn thrillers like Vantage Point, and star-studded political satires like Don’t Look Up, for better or worse. That it’s so convinced it has vital knowledge to bestow upon its audience only makes its open ending all the more head-scratching — to the point that all its political and dramatic intentions cease to matter. And yet, it remains entirely watchable, and entirely fun. Some might be tempted to categorize it as “so bad it’s good,” but its thrills are too damn watertight for such dismissive framing. It’s a “so good it’s good” adrenaline rush, regardless of what kind of good-ness was conceived of on the page, and what kind eventually ends up on the screen.

A House Of Dynamite will be released on Netflix on October 24, 2025.

Siddhant Adlakha (@SiddhantAdlakha) is a New York-based film critic and video essay writer originally from Mumbai. He is a member of the New York Film Critics Circle, and his work has appeared in the New York Times, Variety. the Guardian, and New York Magazine.