With all due respect to “Weapons,” the scariest movie of 2025 just dropped. Director Kathryn Bigelow carved a name for herself with films such as “The Hurt Locker” (2008) and “Zero Dark Thirty” (2012), white-knuckle thrillers based on true stories of 21st century war and geopolitics. With “A House of Dynamite” – part of a loose trilogy with those war movies – Bigelow moves into the world of speculative fiction, meaning we no longer have any reassurance everything will turn out all right in the end. After a grim opening crawl about how the de facto nuclear truce that followed the Cold War is all but kaput, we join captain Olivia Walker (Rebecca Ferguson, “Dune”) deep within the White House situation room. The news is not good: An ICBM has been detected over the Pacific, and while its point of origin is not clear, it’s apparent that it’s on a beeline toward downtown Chicago. Walker’s team scrambles, but must come to terms quickly with the fact that, barring a miracle, more than 10 million people will likely die in the the next 20 minutes.
Of course, a 20-minute countdown is not enough to sustain a feature film. Instead, Bigelow structures her “House” as a triptych, reliving the minutes of scramble three times through the eyes of different characters, gaining insights and context from each. Most affecting is the secretary of defense played by Jared Harris (from HBO’s similarly apocalyptic “Chernobyl”), whose prickly facade slips when he realizes he has personal stake in the Windy City; a brief phone conversation with his distant, college-age daughter, played by “Booksmart” star Kaitlyn Dever, plays like a masterfully understated short story. Others, including Greta Lee, Anthony Ramos and Bigelow regular Jason Clarke, do a lot with a little bit of screen time, each showing us what a normal day looks like in Washington before plunging into the unthinkable. In a film about the end of the civilized world, Bigelow keeps her camera trained on the individual people watching it happen.
Bigelow is perhaps our greatest working director of the political potboiler, and “A House of Dynamite” is no exception. Despite a sprawling cast over the three segments, the sequence of events remains taut and legible, with handy on-screen subtitles spelling out some of the more obscure acronyms. You don’t have to have a degree in poli-sci to understand what’s going on at any moment, and the actors convey expertly just how screwed we are (the answer quickly becomes “extremely”). Through them, the threat feels real – very real.
A tense potboiler, “A House of Dynamite” is not those seeking a lighthearted time at the movies, or those trying to keep their blood pressure down. It’s impossible not to map its events onto the current political landscape, even as Bigelow avoids outright depictions of real-life figures (the president, who keeps his camera shut off during meetings through the first two acts, speaks in a brusque and profane manner that may bring to mind a certain head of state, but you may be surprised when the actor portraying him is revealed). It’s a grade-A suspense thriller, even if you find yourself watching with a lump in your throat. With luck, this work of fiction will remain just that and not a possible reality of tomorrow – at least until cooler heads are in charge.
Starting Oct. 10 at Landmark Kendall Square Cinema, 355 Binney St., Cambridge, and Oct. 24 on Netflix
Oscar Goff is a writer and film critic based in Somerville. He is film editor and senior critic for the Boston Hassle and his work has appeared in the monthly Boston Compass newspaper and publications such as WBUR’s The ARTery and iHeartNoise. He is a member of the Boston Society of Film Critics, the Boston Online Film Critics Association, and the Online Film Critics Society.
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