A single nuclear missile from an unknown source is detected heading towards the United States of America, triggering a race against time to determine who is responsible and how to respond.

A House of Dynamite portrays the same twenty minutes of tension from three different perspectives, essentially creating three overlaying short films. 

“Inclination is Flattening” tells us the story from the perspective of Captain Olivia Walker (Rebecca Ferguson) who is the oversight officer for the White House Situation Room. We see the missile being detected and tracked as multiple different military and governmental protocols kick into place. 

“Hitting a Bullet with a Bullet” tells us the story from the perspective of Deputy National Security Advisor Jake Baerington (Gabriel Basso) who finds himself having to run to the Presidential Emergency Operations Centre (PEOC) thanks to traffic, discussing matters of national security on his phone as he runs. 

“A House Filled with Dynamite” switches us to the viewpoint of the President (Idris Elba) who has to switch from a publicity basketball event to matters of extreme importance in a flash. Being asked to make an impossible decision with incomplete information. 

The result from a technical perspective is quite astonishing. We are ultimately watching the same twenty minutes of time from three perspectives, being barraged with a swathe of technical information via both titles on the screen and the words being spoken and the entire time we are held in a tight vice of tension. 

There is however as much to like as there is to dislike about the end result. 

The good revolves around director Kathryn Bigelow’s superb handling of tension and ability to convey complex militaristic information. Bigelow’s best films include The Hurt Locker and Zero Dark Thirty so she is no stranger to the world of the mechanisms of war and government. Throughout all of this tension though is a human element that is excellently conveyed by a cavalcade of superb actors. Rebecca Ferguson’s character’s call home, Jared Harris’s character unable to tell his daughter what he wants to say, Anthony Ramos’s character needing some air and possibly most heart breaking a pilot dropping a kid’s toy bought as a present as he has to scramble to his plane. 

The bad however is that there will be many who will find the story structure of repeating the same twenty minutes three times unrewarding and the finale unsatisfying. There are small moments of rewarding additional information in the overlapping story, but nothing revelatory. The final story of the three is also unable to live up to the brilliance of the first two with Idris Elba a weak link when compared to the performances of Ferguson and Basso who led the other segments. It is also not really telling us anything more than Stanley Kubrick was able to convey in 1964’s Dr. Strangelove or: How I learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb. 

This lack of a fulfilling ending could also be applied to writer Noah Oppenheim’s other major work this year, the TV show Zero Day with Robert De Niro that started immensely strongly and fizzled in its ending. Kathryn Bigelow’s previous three films that all landed both the tension and the ending were written by Mark Boal and perhaps this film could have done with some attention from him to achieve the same. 

A House of Dynamite is exhilarating for most of its run time but offers a finale that cannot live up to what went before. 

For more reviews of Bigelow’s films please click here: Kathryn Bigelow Retrospective