Venice 2025: Kathryn Bigelow’s ‘A House of Dynamite’ is Staggering
by Alex Billington
September 2, 2025
Whoa. Kathryn Bigelow just made a surprise sequel to Oppenheimer. This is one of the most intensely thrilling movies of the year. Goodness gracious. My palms are still sweaty writing about it now hours after the screening. A House of Dynamite, which should’ve kept the original title as stated in the dialogue, A House Filled with Dynamite, is the first feature film made by Kathryn Bigelow since making Detroit in 2017. She’s back with a fury, with a vengeance, with a story that is going to stir things up and get people talking. But of course – that’s the point. The whole movie is designed to get people to start discussing, well, everything about the state of the world right now. It’s not really a sequel to Oppenheimer but it actually kind of fits because it’s the most vivid continuation of the second half of that masterpiece movie. Nuclear fears are back and more powerful than ever in the real world. And this movie wonders: what would we do in only 20 minutes if there was a single nuclear missile fired towards a major American city? How would the US respond? What would happen? Would the President “push the button” and retaliate with more nukes? It doesn’t actually give any answers but it does get us thinking about the actual answers to all these questions.
Directed by gritty military thriller mastermind filmmaker Kathryn Bigelow, A House of Dynamite features a screenplay written by former NBC News president Noah Oppenheim (also writer of the scripts for Jackie & “Zero Day”). The concise setup: When a single, unattributed missile is launched at the United States, a race begins to determine who is responsible & how to respond. The film also features a Rashomon narrative concept – three different storylines presented as a triptych. In each, we follow a group of people in various American government / military positions figuring out what to do and how to respond within the 20 minute ticking clock countdown after discovering the missile, verifying it, and tracking it as it flies on towards the continental US. A House of Dynamite is actually very specifically not political, it’s rather neutral, telling a mechanical “how would a government realistically respond” procedural thriller story. It’s all a fantasy, with Idris Elba as the current US President. It is not commenting on real world politics, nor is it commenting on America or its imperialism or jingoism or anything like that. It’s ultimately a story about how any nation would be on edge, how the entire world would be completely fucked, if anyone sends a missile towards any other nation. It’s meant to get us thinking but not comment on America’s issues aside from stockpiling our own nukes. The only thing it does want to remind us: we cannot fuck this up if this ever does really happen.
The first segment of A House of Dynamite focuses on White House staffers in the situation room, featuring Rebecca Ferguson, as well as military men at a base in Alaska (featuring Anthony Ramos) that are the first to notice the missile and then fire off the preventative countermeasures meant to intercept and stop the missile. It’s the most intense of the segments because it sets up the story. By the time the 20 minutes runs out you’ll be shaking with fear, trembling with trepidation realizing how realistic of a “holy shit” situation this really would be. The second segment follows the Secretary of Defense and higher up military, providing a more hard-edged POV showing them realizing that they think the only right way to respond to this is to fire off preemptive response nukes before this one hits. It’s just as thrilling but in a much different way. The third segment, pulling everything together, focuses on the President himself & his POV as he’s the one who, at the end of the 20 minute countdown, must decided how to respond and what to do. Let’s just be honest – if there really was a missile fired and we couldn’t stop it and it was about to strike a city, there’s no way any evacuation would work and nothing could be done. We’d (meaning the military & gov) have to respond after no matter what. But do you wait & find out? This is what makes this story such an intense examination of modern nuclear fears. This ain’t the days of the atomic bomb anymore, these are massive, scary, fast nukes.
Just as with The Hurt Locker and Zero Dark Thirty before this, the filmmaking is exceptionally realistic. This is what Bigelow is extraordinary at thanks to years of understanding real government & military inner workings. So many Hollywood movies are cheesy, making everything from the situation room to the missile buttons look fake, but in this movie everything is specifically accurate. Almost too real. It’s about a realistic response (give or take what is currently happening with the fascist takeover in the actual US government in the real world) to this possibility. Including the idea that 20 minutes is an extremely limited amount of time and Hollywood loves to make 20 minutes look like 2 hours when that’s just not the case. There’s a line of dialogue where within minutes of the missile striking, the US President says “give me a minute” and it cuts the clock and the audience let out a very cathartic, loud chuckle because it very seriously is “holy shit we don’t have a minute, Mr. President.” I deeply appreciate this portrayal of realism because it’s exactly what made got my heart racing. I haven’t been this wrecked watching a movie in a while. One of the big questions on my mind: will this be just as thrilling to watch knowing how it all plays out? Once people have figured it out, will they be sitting at home watching it and still feeling the intense thrill of the story? Or not? I’m lucky I had a chance to watch this film on the big screen without knowing anything before it began – because that experience was unforgettably breathtaking. I was literally wiping away sweat on my brow for nearly 2 hours.
The other remarkably clever trick in this is Bigelow’s cast. There’s a huge ensemble of so many recognizable actors. One of my favorite meta tricks is that she casts actors playing the very same character they’ve played in other series or films already. Idris Elba just played the UK Prime Minister in the streaming movie Heads of State. Actor Gabriel Basso plays a secret agent at the White House who gets involved in a conspiracy when an attack happens in the very successful series The Night Agent on Netflix. In here he is also playing almost the same character – a person working in a top secret role at the White House. Whether or not she made all of these casting choices consciously, I’m not sure, though I have to believe she did. But the point is that they ultimately connect to the bigger idea of what she’s trying to do with A House of Dynamite. The film is making us rationalize and realize the scariness of modern, real world nuclear fears, and using these actors playing similar roles forces viewers to pull themselves out of the fantasy of these other stories and, for two hours, seriously think about real world implications of us vs them. Oppenheimer ends with the exact same message. The great fear of nukes in this current day & age is that, if anyone ever actually fires one, the world will be changed forever. There’s no going back then. But if that happens, we (meaning whomever is actually pushing buttons) must carefully decide how to respond without obliterating the rest of the planet. Will they?
Alex’s Venice 2025 Rating: 9.5 out of 10
Follow Alex on Twitter – @firstshowing / Or Letterboxd – @firstshowing
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