The room went silent as soon as the lights dimmed. That’s the thing about a Kathryn Bigelow film — you feel it coming before you even see it. At the Netflix screening of A House of Dynamite, the tension was at an all-time high, a collective holding of breath before the inevitable plunge. What followed was 6 minutes of real-time chaos, repeated three times from different vantage points, each iteration stripping away another layer of control until all that remained was raw human terror and impossible decisions. This is Bigelow’s third film in what she calls her “unofficial trilogy” on the military-industrial complex, following The Hurt Locker and Zero Dark Thirty. While those films examined the machinery of war through boots on the ground and covert operations, A House of Dynamite zooms out to reveal the ultimate nightmare scenario: an unidentified missile launched at the United States, with just minutes to determine who fired it and how to respond. The film doesn’t just ask what you would do in that situation. It forces you to sit with the thought of it, to feel the seconds ticking away, to understand that there are no good answers when annihilation is on the table.
As a viewer, one can appreciate the different points of view throughout the movie. The film unfolds in three acts, each replaying the same 18-minute window from a different location: Fort Greely in Alaska, where the US missile defense system scrambles to intercept; Strategic Command (STRATCOM), which controls the nuclear arsenal; and the White House Situation Room, where President (Idris Elba) must make the final call. It’s a narrative Russian nesting doll, each layer revealing more chaos, more humanity, more impossible pressure.
What makes A House of Dynamite so effective is its refusal to identify the enemy. There’s no villain to root against, no clear moral victory to be had. The antagonist, as Bigelow puts it, is “the system we’ve built to essentially end the world on a hair-trigger.” This isn’t about geopolitics. It’s about the fundamental insanity of living in a world where several countries possess enough nuclear weapons to end civilization within minutes, and yet we’ve collectively decided not to address it. What elevates A House of Dynamite beyond a technical showcase is its moral clarity. This isn’t a film interested in easy answers or flag-waving heroics. It’s a film that asks why we’ve built a system where one person has sole authority to end the world, and why we’ve accepted living under that constant threat as normal. “We’re living in a house of dynamite,” Bigelow said. “I felt it was so important to get that information out there, so we could start a conversation.”
Leaving the screening, the usual post-film chatter provided different perspectives. People weren’t dissecting plot points or debating performances. They were sitting with the discomfort, the lingering dread of a scenario that felt real. In a world where nuclear brinkmanship has returned to headlines, A House of Dynamite doesn’t feel like entertainment. It feels like a necessary alarm impossible to ignore. The film’s most provocative move is its refusal to provide closure. This allows the viewers to draw their own conclusions while thinking of the critical pieces of the current state of society. Bigelow has always been a filmmaker unafraid of difficult subjects, but with A House of Dynamite, she’s made her most urgent work yet. It’s not about what happens if the worst occurs. It’s about the fact that we’ve built a world where it could, and we’ve decided that it is acceptable. The real explosion Bigelow is after isn’t on screen. It’s the conversation we have afterward — the one we should have been having all along.
A House of Dynamite opens in UK theaters on October 3 and in the US on October 10, before streaming globally on Netflix beginning October 24.