After the end of the Cold War, mankind agreed that a life without atomic bombs was better, a text board introduces the film – and warns that this era is now over. Indeed, the fear of nuclear escalation has become more and more stricter in times, also due to a large number of actors increasingly complex geopolitical tensions and growing upgrade. “We are lost,” you read accordingly in comment columns for current Jobs messages-Kathryn Bigelow made the film for this feeling with her star-picked Netflix production “A House of Dynamite”.
In the past, one spoke of a balance of terror: two nuclear powers – the USA and the Soviet Union – that held each other by threatening total annihilation in check. Today the number of nuclear powers has grown to nine, the alliances are fragile. Nevertheless, the picture of the balance between the nuclear powers is also striving at one point in “A House of Dynamite”: the fact that everyone could wipe out the other at any time would suffocate an attack in the bud. The film is fully aware of the dangerous absurdity and paradox of this premise: The largest conceivable catastrophe can only be prevented by the fact that your possibility exists at all – a world in which nuclear mass destruction weapons do not even exist is unthinkable.
Security guards, the military and employee of the White House are preparing for the greatest possible catastrophe – but is your training enough for an emergency?
The scenario designed in “A House of Dynamite” is as simple as it is scary and effective: a nuclear missile moves straight towards the USA at a frenzied speed – but not only is it unclear at which direction the floor is moving, nobody has an idea of who is behind the attack. Do Russia or China have their fingers in the game, or is it a single -gear of North Korea? And what could be the intention? Is it just about pluning the United States into chaos, or is it a targeted maneuver to provoke the United States for a preventive strike – but if so, for whom?
Decisions must be made within minutes, which in case of doubt the life of billions of people depends. Where classic agent films, in which the continued existence of mankind is also at stake, jump back and forth between countries and continents, the Oscar winner Bigelow (“Tödliche command- The Hurt Lock”) introduces us in the shortest possible time that form a kind of infrastructure for the reaction to the unimaginable- from the white situation room, the nerve center of the government All kinds of crises, through the Federal Emergency Management Agency responsible for civil disaster help, up to military base points, the operating center of the Pentagon and of course the Oval Office, in which the US President played by Idris Elba will finally have the last word.
An extreme situation, three perspectives
“A House of Dynamite” tells the same situation three times in a row, each of different perspectives, focuses on changing figures and locations. For a large part of the time we see little more than people in back rooms, accompanied on the soundtrack by an excited cacophony of tangle, telephone rings, tipping noises and the pumping score by Volker Bertelsmann (“Conclave”). However, action virtuoso Kathryn Bigelow (“dangerous surf”) invites the potentially dry settings with the highest level of energy. You do not need much more than a number of professionals under maximum pressure.
The somewhat flat, partly series -like digital images can be seen that Bigelow made her first production for the Netflix streaming service here seven years after the wrongly flopped “Detroit”. But the director can fill this aesthetics with her will to the great motif and her staging skills. Already at the beginning, a soldier is reminiscent of Jerry-Bruckheimer productions from the 1990s in front of the setting sun, and again and again it circles the massive-phallic Washington Monument, which cannot keep its promise of unity and resistance. If the camera (as usually) is indoors, it supports the escalative dynamics with abrupt zooms and zippers.
Olivia Walker (Rebecca Ferguson) is only one of the many people, of whom not only depends on national security.
It is emphasized several times which (also financial) effort is behind the native security precautions. But in the end it is people who have to make far -reaching decisions under the greatest possible stress – and even the most meticulous training does not guarantee that they have grown in an emergency. Bigelow has shot a sweaty, powerful, steadfast threading thriller – but at the same time anything but a soothing film. Until the consistent final act, it dispenses with security nets and ideological certainties. The credits begin, and inevitably you think: “How are lost.” “A House of Dynamite” is irrefutable a film of our time.
Conclusion: In her first film for seven years, Oscar winner Kathryn Bigelow has processed the rampant fear of nuclear annihilation in a breathless thriller that, despite his global dimensions, primarily takes part in interiors – and develops a maximum of intensity there.
We saw “A House of Dynamite” as part of the Venice Filmfest 2025, where he celebrated its world premiere as part of the official competition