‘A House of Dynamite’ is nerve-wracking- it’s just a shame about that ending

Kathryn Bigelow returns to filmmaking with this Netflix film, which brings a familiar tension about nuclear brinksmanship

We know that Kathryn Bigelow, the director of The Hurt Locker and Zero Dark Thirty, is great at a few things: She knows how to ratchet up the tension, especially when it involves whether or not a bomb is going to go off. She’s great at telling stories set in the offices of government bureaucrats, in situation rooms, and where the work and personal lives of such figures intersect.

In A House of Dynamite, her first film as director in eight years, Bigelow gets to do all of that, in a sprawling but taut story about a rogue nuclear missile, of unknown origin, heading towards the United States. Can it be stopped? What should the U.S. do to retaliate? And since such a thing is possible in a fictional situation in which most of the people are basically competent, what hope would the rest of us have, should that happen in real life?

In the film, written by Noah Oppenheim, the story is told three different times, from different perspectives, with some scenes repeating themselves from different vantage points. In the first telling, the protagonist is a White House situation room officer (Rebecca Ferguson), who becomes aware that a missile has taken off from Asia, although no one seems to know who launched it, and against whom we might need to retaliate.

We also meet the people at the station in Alaska (led by Anthony Ramos) tasked with shooting down the missile, a North Korea expert (Greta Lee), the secretary of Defense (the very un-Hegseth-like Jared Harris), a general (Tracey Letts), the deputy National Security Adviser (Gabriel Basso), and finally, the president of the United States (Idris Elba, now in the Oval Office just a few months after playing the British prime minister in Heads of State.)

These people are all tasked with trying to save the world, while also occasionally getting into arguments with each other; we also see just about everyone, at one point or another, making an effort to warn their family about the potential devastation to come.

There’s a lot that Bigelow gets right in A House of Dynamite. The production seems to have paid a lot of attention to detail in terms of what these government buildings, rooms, and equipment are supposed to look like.

The tension is palpable throughout, and the gimmick of repeatedly restarting the clock from different perspectives is one that very much works. I really enjoyed Idris Elba’s choice to play the president as something of a nervous wreck, which is both against type for the actor and wildly different from how fiction has traditionally portrayed American presidents. And Gabriel Basso — amusingly, the same actor who played JD Vance in the Hillbilly Elegy movie – is convincing as the guy who appears to be the government’s main voice of reason.

No, this film is not an exercise of pro-military or pro-government propaganda, as some of the early reviews have ludicrously stated. No, A House of Dynamite doesn’t try to mount an argument against nuclear proliferation, like many films in this subgenre have. And I’m sure the Pentagon cooperated with the production to some degree, but I can’t imagine many people watching this film and then concluding, “yes, we’re in good hands.”

But all that said… it all leads up to an ending that might be my least favorite of any movie this year.

Yikes. I won’t spoil what happens, or what doesn’t happen, except to say this: The film not only cops out storytelling-wise, but cops out on another level, in not really determing what type of film it ultimately wants to be. The guy sitting in front of me in the theater literally threw up his hands once he realized what was happening, and I feel like he won’t be the other one.

The other big issue is, the film has such a sprawing cast that it at times gets to be too sprawling. We’re introduced to a CNN journalist, in the White House briefing room, who ends up having nothing to do in the plot at all. Ditto for Kaitlyn Dever, in a one-scene performance as the Defense Secretary’s daugther, Brittany O’Grady as the Basso character’s wife, and Moses Ingram as the head of FEMA. Renee Elise Goldsberry gets a nothing role as the first lady, seen only on a mission in Africa. One gets the sense there was originally a much longer cut, that had more signifcant things for all of these talented people to do.

This is Bigelow’s first film in eight years, since 2017’s Detroit, a super-tense drama about the Detroit riots of 1967. It was a film with clear antiracist sentiments, in which bloodthirsty cops were the unambiguous villains. But Detroit happened to come out at the worst possible time for a white woman director to make a movie about racism, as a critical consensus soon emerged in from some corners that it was “not her story to tell.” The director hadn’t done anything since, with one Netflix project falling apart at the last minute.

As Bigelow is no longer working with her former partner Mark Boal, who wrote The Hurt Locker and Zero Dark Thirty, A House of Dynamite was written by Noah Oppenheim, the former NBC News president who has a side career as a screenwriter. I know his name best as a secondary villain in Ronan Farrow’s book Catch and Kill, in which Farrow repeatedly punctuated his complaints about Oppenheim blocking his Harvey Weinstein reporting by taking shots at Oppenheim’s lackluster screenplay for the film Jackie.

A House of Dynamite is a much better-written film than Jackie, but still… that ending.

A House of Dynamite lands in theaters this Friday, and on Netflix on October 24.