A House of Dynamite: Kathryn Bigelow’s terrifying nuclear threat thriller might be her best work yet

• Reviewed from the 2025 Venice Film Festival

The cinema of nuclear annihilation is relatively sparse, despite (or because of) the enormity of the threat. Nevil Shute’s On the Beach was made into a sombre film by Stanley Kramer in 1959, while Stanley Kubrick used the scenario of Mutual Assured Destruction as the basis for his darkest comedy Dr. Strangelove (1964). Television has proven an important outlet, with Mick Jackson’s Threads traumatising anyone who saw it on its first broadcast in 1984, and swiftly becoming the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament’s best ever recruitment tool. A year earlier, Ronald Reagan watched Nicholas Meyer’s TV movie The Day After in the White House before it was broadcast; he noted in his diary that it left him depressed and changed his thinking on nuclear war. Arms reduction talks would follow and the threat of war would recede, without ever going away.

The text that opens Kathryn Bigelow’s new film A House of Dynamite tells us the period of de-escalation is over, the threat of nuclear conflict is once more on the rise. Then the action begins: a launch is detected by an early warning station in Alaska, and the message is soon being relayed up the chain of command. In the White House Situation room, duty officer Captain Olivia Walker (Rebecca Ferguson) arrives to take charge as the apparent missile’s trajectory is plotted, possible targets for retaliation identified (it comes from the ocean, so could have been launched by anyone with a submarine – North Korea might have that capacity, we hear), and calls are set up.

Bigelow and her screenwriter Noah Oppenheim understand that there is tension to spare in the first half hour of an alert, and they keep personal dramas to a minimum. A soldier has recently broken up with his girlfriend; the deputy secretary of defense has a pregnant wife; Ferguson’s character has a sick child at home – she absent-mindedly takes his toy dinosaur from her pocket. This is just enough to tell us that, as well as functionaries, these are human beings, their minds racing about the imminent deaths of loved ones.

Structurally, the film resembles those 1970s disaster movies that sublimated nuclear anxieties into other catastrophes (earthquakes, capsized cruiseliners). Here the main character is the missile, and the rest of the ensemble come and go as the looming disaster plays out from different angles. First, it’s Walker and her boss Admiral Mark Miller (Jason Clarke), trying to keep cool and remind everyone that this is likely a false alarm. Then we have Tracy Letts as basketball-loving General Anthony Brady, who must cajole the president into some kind of response. “This is insanity”, Idris Elba’s shell-shocked Potus exclaims. “No, it’s reality”, Brady corrects him. Finally, the president and the secretary of defence (Jared Harris) face unthinkable decisions for which they are woefully unprepared (they’ve had more briefings on replacing Supreme Court justices than on nuclear conflict). “Is that all $50 billion buys us?” the secretary explodes on hearing the chances of intercepting the missile. “It’s like trying to hit a bullet with a bullet”, the deputy national security adviser (Gabriel Basso) explains.

Performances are excellent, with little emoting beyond an occasional glassy stare, so that watching Rebecca Ferguson refusing to cry, or a character apologising to another for getting angry about potato chips at a workstation, becomes oddly moving. It is tempting to set this alongside The Hurt Locker (2008) and Zero Dark Thirty (2012) as part of a ‘Fucking the World Up’ trilogy; but A House of Dynamite might be Bigelow’s crowning achievement, a film which should restart discussion of the continued proliferation of nuclear weapons. It is a brilliantly tense thriller, but on top of that, you’d need a heart of stone and a skull filled with gravel not to feel like calling your loved ones as you leave the cinema.

Throughout the film, Bigelow sprinkles glimpses of American iconography – Washington DC’s memorial architecture and images of previous presidents (Lincoln, Eisenhower and Obama). One terrifying aspect of the film is that it compels you to imagine even a fraction of this kind of crisis happening under the current administration. Genocidal, suicidal, world-annihilating violence is written into the DNA of nuclear warfare. As Lucy Walker’s 2010 nuclear proliferation documentary Countdown to Zero argues: on a long enough timeline, even the highly improbable becomes inevitable. Or as the tagline of the film puts it: “Not if. When.”