by Nataliia Serebriakova
Worth: $10.00
FilmInk rates movies out of $20 — the score indicates the amount we believe a ticket to the movie to be worth
Cast:
Rebecca Ferguson, Idris Elba, Greta Lee, Gabriel Basso, Jason Clarke, Jared Harris, Anthony Ramos, Tracy Letts, Kaitlyn Dever
Intro:
… a film that stares into the abyss of power only to flinch and salute.
In A House of Dynamite, which premiered at the Venice Film Festival, director Kathryn Bigelow returns to her favourite subject (like in The Hurt Locker or Zero Dark Thirty) — American militarism — but this time the battlefield is not a desert, but the corridors of power. The premise is deceptively simple: an unidentified nuclear missile is heading toward the United States, and the politicians and military officials only have 18 minutes to prevent a possible catastrophe.
The story is told from three different perspectives, stretching those eighteen minutes of narrative time into two hours of screen time. At the centre of the film is senior adviser Olivia, played by Rebecca Ferguson. One morning, she arrives at work, hands over her phone, while her husband takes their sick child to the doctor. In her pocket, she keeps a small reminder of her son — a toy dinosaur, which later becomes an emotional trigger for the audience.
Bigelow and screenwriter Noah Oppenheim worked closely with military experts to craft a film that at times resembles a bureaucratic thriller, its characters speaking in a dense web of acronyms and codes incomprehensible to the average viewer. The tripartite structure is justified in that each new section moves the story to a higher level of political hierarchy — yet it adds little in terms of new perspective. This is the main weakness of a film constructed with such cold precision.
Viewers may also notice a distinctly propagandistic tint in Bigelow’s cinematic language, which feels thoroughly Americanised — as in moments when the reflection of the U.S. flag shimmers in a puddle, or the Pentagon is lovingly framed against a sunrise. That same cinematic vocabulary extends to the rhythm, as Bigelow’s seasoned hand creates an artificial sense of suspense. A group of schoolchildren runs down the steps; young basketball players warm up for a game — all while the world teeters on the brink of annihilation.
What’s particularly interesting is Bigelow’s decision to return the United States to a more idealised era — when the country was led by a Black president (played here by Idris Elba) and genuine democracy seemed to flourish. It’s as if she’s suggesting that even in America’s best days, catastrophe is still possible. She avoids building the story around the textures of Trump-era America — a political reality that can’t bear any criticism — perhaps to make it easier for viewers to empathise with her characters: the poor Americans forced to face an impending nuclear disaster.
Bigelow doesn’t deliver catharsis or genuine insight; instead, she wraps moral ambiguity in a polished, patriotic shell. A House of Dynamite wants to appear reflective, even self-critical, yet it never truly questions the system that it portrays. By situating the story in a nostalgically “better” America — complete with a virtuous president and a functioning democracy — Bigelow creates a fantasy of moral clarity that contradicts the film’s supposed complexity. The danger she points to remains abstract, sanitised, and safely contained within cinematic spectacle. For all its technical precision, A House of Dynamite feels less like a critique of militarism than a careful reaffirmation of it — a film that stares into the abyss of power only to flinch and salute.
