Review | A House of Dynamite (2025)

A well-oiled machine corrodes with the first drop of sweat in Bigelow's 11th feature.

Image: A House of Dynamite – Netflix.

Kathryn Bigelow once again turns her camera toward American militarism under duress, following The Hurt Locker and Zero Dark Thirty. With less than an hour to impact, members of various U.S. government and military offices scramble to determine who launched a nuclear ballistic missile heading for the continental United States and how to respond, confronted by the realization that while rehearsal is orderly, reality is entropic.

Accompanied by Volker Bertelmann’s score, which more than nods to his work on Conclave, one can’t help but feel that a papal drama is about to unfold in a new Rome on the Potomac. While no pope dies here, an American conclave does take place, with the fate of the world on the ballot.

Bigelow’s venture into hyperlink cinema, retelling a 37-minute crisis in real time from detection to impact, falters as the characters’ worlds intersect through video conferencing, revealing little new information in each retelling and steadily draining narrative tension. Meant to reflect the bureaucratic redundancies of an American crisis apparatus, the experience of watching it still borders on punishment. Noah Oppenheim’s screenplay shows that familiarity with writing a White House for a chamber drama like Jackie fails to translate into a thriller of this scale. One can’t help but wonder if the exhaustion is deliberate or simply the by-product of a faltering experiment.

The barrage of military acronyms and procedural jargon, spelled out on screen, is intended to orient the viewer but only triggers fatigue. It is the kind of thriller made for Netflix multitaskers: if you miss something the first time, you will catch it in the second or third retelling.

Micro push-pull camerawork desperately searches for psychological realism, only to be undercut by the dissonance of British actors filling the roles of the President of the United States (Idris Elba) and the Secretary of Defense (Jared Harris), the latter having recently portrayed King George VI in The Crown.

With crisp, propulsive editing, A House of Dynamite sustains its procedural rhythm to dizzying effect, despite the retellings, or maybe in spite of them, which is aided by Bertelmann’s masterful, albeit derivative, growling string orchestra.

A redeeming element lies in the dynamic between the grandeur of the U.S. war machine and the impolitic nature of humans who steer it: the President yawns, a military official eats junk food near the control panel that can launch ballistic missiles, and everyone sweats. Bigelow scrutinizes the line separating an American patriot from a loved one fearing loss and shows that breaking of protocol is not a question of if but when. Closing in on the cracks within a system that’s supposed to be ready for anything (United States spent more than $1 trillion USD on defense this year) reveals that a well-oiled machine can corrode and disintegrate with the first drop of sweat.

Rating: ⚫ ⚫