A House of Dynamite Review: NYFF 2025

Kathryn Bigelow blows the roof off the Rashômon effect with A House of Dynamite. This nerve-wracking thriller from the Oscar winning director of The Hurt Locker and Zero Dark Thirty may be the horror film of 2025. A House of Dynamite observes the response to immanent nuclear catastrophe through competing perspectives. The clock ticks away when watchful eyes identify a nuclear missile sailing from Asia towards the United States. Every second counts as the eyes on the ground rally to fulfill the protocols they rehearse hundreds of times annually. But as the seconds lower and the DEFCON levels drop with increasing severity, the countdown becomes perilously, treacherously, and nerve-wracking suspenseful. The slightest hesitation potentially spells catastrophe, which serves a pretty dire fate considering the boobs currently holding office.

Bigelow, working with a meticulously researched script from Noah Oppenheim (Jackie), works her way up the corridors of power as everyone holds their breath. The first pensive gasp whips through Captain Olivia Walker (Rebecca Ferguson) after she says goodbye to her son and husband. She arrives at the White House like it’s any other day, but quickly into her shift, the alarm sounds. This is not a drill.

Up in Greely, Alaska, eyes on the sky include Major Daniel Gonzalez (Anthony Ramos) and some recruits far too young for doomsday. As the missile ascends from an unidentified area, Walker confers with her superior, Admiral Mark Miller (Jason Clarke), and a plethora of politicians and military personnel on video conference. They have 18 minutes to disable the weapon and, potentially, launch a counterstrike to show force. General Brady (Tracy Letts) advocates over the video conference that neutralising the enemy is of the essence. But nobody can pinpoint said enemy.

Those 18 minutes unfold with each second seemingly holding a lifetime of action. A House of Dynamite doesn’t quite play out in real time, but it’s bracingly lean—a film with no room for error and even less space to breathe. The perspective shifts to replay those 18 minutes again as Deputy National Security Advisor Jake Baerington (Gabriel Basso) takes a leading position when his superior’s out for a colonoscopy. The kid can barely say goodbye to his pregnant wife and navigate the security line at the White House, and finicky cellphone signals, as people in the highest levels of office ask for major assessments at rapid speed. The brass hesitates for seconds when the young advisor shares perfectly rational and clear answers they don’t like. The clock keeps ticking.

Act three goes to the top of the food chain where the President (Idris Elba) readies for a youth basketball game. His day of shooting hoops gets interrupted My Pet Goat-style and the Navy Lieutenant Commander (Jonah Hauer-King) who’s always at his side springs into action. The LC opens his trusty case, dubbed “the football,” and presents the POTUS with a menu of options: rare, medium, and extra crispy. The President has mere seconds to respond to retaliation scenarios that could spell the next Hiroshima or Nagasaki to prevent another Pearl Harbor. Oppenheim’s script forgoes party politics. It never tells whether POTUS plays for the right or the left, although acts one and two tease a Trump-like figure, if one because one assumes him to be on the golf course because we can’t see him.

As the seconds count down, A House of Dynamite weaves between situation rooms and secret locations, juggles conference calls and audio calls, and brings together a tapestry of interconnected players united by their fate. The interplay between the three perspectives evokes not variations of truth, but rather shifts in perspective and psychology. Each viewpoint sees the situation from the point-of-view of someone with personal stakes that help or hinder their actions. A moment spent calling home, say, might be 60 seconds misspent when millions of lives are on the line.

A weak link, for example, comes in the Secretary of Defense (Jared Harris), who struggles to stay on the ball. He still copes with the recent loss of his wife, and the identified strike zone puts his daughter (Kaitlin Dever) in danger. He’s not in the right headspace to make decisions. At one point, he drops off the call—an action that plays quite differently the higher up the ladder A House of Dynamite goes. The film intricately explores the element of human error among these carefully rehearsed protocols. For all the preparedness, nothing can account for someone else’s day.

Oppenheim’s script draws upon his journalism background to deliver a meticulously researched thriller about the fallacy of American defenses. The film wonders how stacking a nation full of weapons protects its citizens amid explosive attacks. One of the three storylines sees the team in Greely try to take out the weapon with a missile of their own. It’s a Hail Mary shot that Baerington likens to trying to hit a bullet with a bullet. Later, one of the bodies in the room compares America itself to the titular house of dynamite. The threat isn’t so much North Korea, China, or Russia, but rather the arsenal on which the nation sits.

Bigelow brings her own robust eye for realism and authenticity to make A House of Dynamite both a gripping human drama and a potent exploration of the American war machine. Her direction proves open and precise, navigating myriad storylines told across numerous faces, devices, and screens. Working again with cinematographer Barry Ackroyd, Bigelow gets extensive coverage of each scene, while also giving the actors freedom to process the environments and tools that inform their characters. (During a conversation at the New York Film Festival this week, Tracy Letts observed that he once counted 26 cameras on him.)

This immersive production style ensures that each actor excels with a performance that allows audiences to feel both the personal and collective stakes of those 18 minutes. Rebecca Ferguson anchors the first act with a gripping performance. The humanity she brings to Captain Walker, a mother whose love for her child—and fear that she’ll never see it again—fuels her to keep a steady head while tossing the word salad of abbreviations and techno babble that these military types trade while saving the nation. For all the jargon, Oppenheim, Bigelow, and the actors keep it accessible.

Walker, unfortunately, is among the few members of the ensemble who doesn’t appear much outside her own act. The same goes for Basso and Elba, who serve as the primary eyes in acts two and three, respectively. Like Ferguson, they both appear intermittently on the calls. The heart-pounding score by Volker Bertelmann (Conclave) ratchets up the tension, while evoking similar themes across three movements to provide the emotional consistency across the thriller. The absence of these faces elsewhere can be frustrating since the film gets an especially strong start thanks to Ferguson, but the effect also evokes the sheer scale of the operation. Each player has a role both big and small in the grand scheme. A House of Dynamite truly excels as an ensemble piece, though, with each part perfectly cast—it illustrates why it’s high time for the Academy to award an Oscar for casting.

Having so many players in the operation means that film editor Kirk Baxter has the mightiest task of them all. A House of Dynamite intricately pieces the mosaic of stories together. Baxter admirably builds the three stories with propulsive force. He emphasizes select elements in one perspective that may appear inconsequential in another, with facets of the ticking clock timed with a level of dramatic exactitude that keeps one’s heart racing even on the third trip through the events. Bigelow might blow up the explosive drama, but Baxter laudably puts it all together.