Director Kathryn Bigelow has more than a few well regarded political thrillers in her resume, and sometimes they work for me, sometimes they don’t. Zero Dark Thirty, for instance, felt exciting and of the moment, and it felt like she may have been the wrong person to make Detroit. I was looking forward to her new film, A House of Dynamite, after its critically lauded premiere at this year’s Venice Film Festival. It seemed like all the pieces were in place for another very tense, of the moment, zeitgeisty thriller. Unfortunately, A House of Dynamite does not capture this current moment in the same ways Bigelow has nailed before.

Olivia (Rebecca Ferguson) is a senior officer in the White House situation room. She and her colleagues scramble to find a solution when they discover an imminent nuclear missile has been launched by an unidentified enemy, headed toward the United States. 

As a piece of media designed to fill you with existential dread, I guess this is effective. Our current administration would certainly not respond to this kind of situation as well as these characters do, and that’s terrifying. And every American for generations has been filled with some level of paralyzing fear about the possibility of nuclear disaster, and unfortunately that’s kind of all this movie has. There are no human beings worth caring about, and the film has surprisingly little to say about the world around it. You can tell Bigelow and her screenwriter, former head of NBC News, Noah Oppenheim, are committed to getting facts right, but the cold and clinical tone simply does not work for this kind of story. We need something more to latch onto emotionally, and that’s difficult when the film keeps the viewer emotionally at a distance.

There really isn’t anything to note regarding the performances either. This film has that 1970s disaster movie vibe of many familiar faces popping up throughout, yet nobody having anything of note to do. I enjoyed the earlier section with Rebecca Ferguson at the center, although she is forced to do this American accent that doesn’t work, and the same goes for Idris Elba. We have Greta Lee, Anthony Ramos, Jonah Hauer-King, Renee Elise-Goldsberry, Tracy Letts and Jared Harris popping up in roles that mean almost nothing. And I don’t think it’s the fault of the performers as much as it is that nobody is given an actual character to play. These are all people scrambling to react in the wake of something horrifying. And we move back and forth from one viewpoint to another so haphazardly, none of it ultimately means anything.

The structure of this script is a big problem as well. When we begin, we find out we’re only 18 minutes away from impact, and we see those 18 minutes play out from varying perspectives. So as a result, this structure lets the film meander where it should enthrall, and it’s constantly shouting a bunch of jargon and buzz words at you and giving you on-screen title cards explaining things that the characters just said. And again, there is admiration to be found in the fact that Oppenheim and Bigelow are so committed to getting the details and facts right. But when this film seems to also exist in a completely different political world than the one we currently live in, it feels divorced from anything topical or recognizable. Maybe the point is that even with a competent group of people, there are some things that are just out of our control. And that message is terrifying and almost nihilistic and in fall 2025, I’m too beaten down by the world around me to appreciate what this movie is trying to say.

If you’re a fan of Kathryn Bigelow’s previous films and the tone she often goes for, you might find more to enjoy in A House of Dynamite than I did. I think the film comes awfully close to being truly important and of the moment, but too often it veers off into another direction and loses focus. And that would be fine if there were more here to enjoy as simply a piece of entertainment, but I was not entertained and I was not enjoying the experience of watching this film. I felt tense, I felt uncomfortable, and then it was over, and maybe that’s the entire point. Oh, and a quick word about the ending – this film has one of the most unsatisfying endings I’ve seen all year. It builds and builds to what we think is going to be something that’s going to stick in our minds forever, and then it ends on a definitive shoulder shrug. And it’s the kind of ending that sent me out of the theater thinking about all this movie did wrong, and I can’t imagine that was Bigelow’s goal here.