Venice Film Festival 2025, Review: A House of Dynamite

What would happen if a nuclear missile were launched toward the United States? This is the question Kathryn Bigelow explores in A House of Dynamite, alternating between three perspectives. The first belongs to Captain Olivia Walker (Rebecca Ferguson), who has a husband and daughter, and finds herself facing nineteen minutes in the White House situation room before the missile strikes Chicago. Her decisions are crucial in the opening minutes but diminish as impact approaches: time passes, and the missile sent to intercept the nuclear weapon fails to hit its target. After those fateful minutes—while Olivia futilely attempts to warn her husband to leave the city—the screen goes black.

The second perspective belongs to Jake Baerington (Gabriel Basso), Deputy National Security Advisor: his wife is pregnant, and he unexpectedly confronts the situation. This viewpoint appears more fragmented than the previous one, failing to deliver the same sense of completeness. The third focus shifts to the President of the United States, attending a gathering of young basketball players. He's suddenly whisked away due to the DEFCON 2 alert, the second-highest level of military readiness, indicating an imminent attack requiring increased armed forces preparedness. The President confronts an advisor who opens the black book of nuclear security outlining the subsequent phases. "I don't even know what that is," the President responds, in what is perhaps the most fully realized episode. Indeed, the adversaries—possibly Chinese or Russian—might deploy additional weapons, and after the initial attack, the President must decide whether to initiate nuclear war.

A House of Dynamite manages to calibrate its directorial timing precisely, showing within those nineteen minutes what would truly unfold. The details help capture the anxiety, from cell phones left behind before entering the situation room to the precision in analyzing the missile operation. Perhaps the redundancy of episodes leads to narrative fatigue, but given the situation into which we're thrust, the tension remains constant. Certainly, the characters' emotions don't bleed through as they must resolve the situation within those fateful nineteen minutes, after which Chicago's ten million inhabitants—the target city—would be wiped out. But emotionality has never been Bigelow's forte; she maps her territory more through details rather than the broader vision.