‘A House of Dynamite’ Is A Gripping, Hyper-Realistic Nuclear-War Nightmare

Minor spoilers for A House of Dynamite to follow.

Nearly a decade into Netflix’s big moviemaking project, we kinda know what a Netflix film looks like. In bucket A: cheap romcoms with C-list stars. Bucket B: expensive action movies with an A-listers. And then there’s bucket C: Auteur-led Oscar hopefuls.

To date, the last category has largely been full of films that demand a big-screen experience. Take Maestro, Bradley Cooper’s 2023 Leonard Bernstein biopic, a film full of tear-jerkingly beautiful shots and set pieces, like the climactic rendition of the finale of Gustav Mahler’s Second Symphony, which Cooper conducts in real time. I saw that movie in the theater, twice, and both times it felt completely exhilarating. Obviously, the majority of viewers didn’t experience it that way, and that has to have harmed the way the film was received. It’s the obvious, much-discussed flaw of Netflix’s industry domination—while most of these movies now get cinematic runs due to Academy rules, the streaming platform is where they live and die. That is clearly not great for those who value the cinematic experience.

But in A House of Dynamite, Kathryn Bigelow’s timely thriller about a nuclear strike on the USA, Netflix may have just found the sweet spot. The film is packed with prestigious actors, brilliantly constructed, taut as a guitar string, and gripping as hell. But visually—well, it kind of looks like a TV show. In fact, it looks a lot like an episode of 24, and that’s not where the similarities end. And I really do mean that as the highest of compliments.

Here’s what I’m getting at: This movie takes place in real time as the US government deals with a nuclear missile that is en route to an American city. We see the same 30ish minutes play out three times, from several different perspectives. Much of the action takes place in a situation room—grey, dark, jammed with computer screens like 24’s Counter Terrorism Unit—where Rebecca Ferguson’s official communicates with the president (Idris Elba, who spends the first two-thirds of the movie camera-less on a Zoom call), the Secretary of Defense (Jared Harris) and several military generals as the incoming attack escalates. Then there’s the launch site of the weapon they hope will neutralize the incoming missile, and the White House itself.

It is, to put it mildly, completely fucking terrifying. It’s as if Bigelow thought, ‘What is the thing everyone is most afraid of right now?’ and then decided to make a hyper-realistic depiction of that very thing unfolding. If you have nuclear-war anxiety—and of course you do—it will give your nightmares a decent dollop of texture.

We watch employees like Ferguson get ready for work, kiss their kids goodbye and arrive at their jobs like any normal day before news of the nuclear launch breaks. The camerawork has a human touch to it, with the kinds of shakes and zooms that you’d expect to see in an episode of Succession. No one takes the threat all that seriously at first; the missile initially appears to be bound for the Pacific Ocean. But then its projected strike zone shifts to the continental United States, and the panic begins. To go into much more detail would risk spoiling a deeply tense watch—the creeping dread and existential terror it provokes are best experienced in real time, too.