Earlier this year, Idris Elba played the British Prime Minister in “Heads of State,” a broad and raucous farce produced by Amazon. This week at the Venice Film Festival, he plays an American President in “A House of Dynamite,” a tense, precise, extremely sobering thriller produced by Netflix. This testifies to his range on a number of levels.
“Dynamite” is the long-awaited new film directed by Kathryn Bigelow, whose last picture was almost a decade ago. That was “Detroit,” which was a fact-based drama; her three prior films, including the highly praised and awarded “The Hurt Locker” and “Zero Dark Thirty,” were historical dramas as well. “Dynamite,” scripted by Noel Oppenheim, is a fiction. It’s also a warning. The tagline for the movie on the posters out here is “Not if. When.”
And the answer to “When what?” is nuclear war. Older films about this apocalyptic scenario have considered this eventuality as the result of an accident. Here, maybe it’s not.
The movie is in three parts; at the end of each part, the timeline rewinds to the beginning or thereabouts. The components are varied, including individuals who are experts in their fields and trained to make crucial decisions. But also, we see people with families and banal Beltway lives and everyday concerns. A defense department figure who’s looking after a kid with a fever. A situation room conductor who finds herself staring down her worst day. A specialist on a military base is coming apart after a phone fight with his girlfriend and soon finds himself having to try and knock a missile of possibly North Korean origin out of the sky before it hits Chicago. And more. There’s a Defense Secretary whose beloved daughter actually lives in Chicago. Finally, there’s the President, who doesn’t appear until an hour into the movie, but is often heard in varied windowless amphitheaters plugged into various views of the world, tracking the trajectory of the aforementioned missile.
Can the weapon be knocked out of the air? Whether it can be or not, will the U.S. retaliate? Bigelow takes us not just to the high seats of command, but to the middle-America missile silos that get put on alert. We are at one juncture bounced into a Civil War reenactment, but the movie isn’t time-traveling to make a point: a crucial translator is spending the afternoon there with her son. The movie contains a couple of other not-quite-fake outs, and they’re all pertinent to the theme. As harrowing as the movie is, there’s real pleasure in experiencing how Bigelow orchestrates it all. And it’s educational too, maybe not in a way you ever wanted. Acronyms appear on the screen, and then the letters stretch apart, and words are filled in. For instance, SSNB stands for “Self Sufficient Nuclear Bunker,” which you’ll want to buy after you see this movie…But I think this structure is ultimately not available to the average consumer.
Rebecca Ferguson is Olivia Walker, the Situation Room maestro; Tracy Letts is General Baker, who can make a few calls before the matter has to be turned over to the President. Both actors perform profiles in competence and conscience with exceptional craft, all the better to underscore Bigelow and Oppenheim’s point that none of that ultimately matters once Defcon 1 is in play.
Weighing his options, Elba’s chief executive fumes at General Baker, “This is insanity.” Keeping his cool as best he’s able (which is pretty damn good), Baker replies, “This is reality.” Bigelow’s ability to take a series of hypotheticals and render them into narrative actuality has never been more pinpoint accurate or merciless. One irony of the scenario is that the personnel depicted here have been thoroughly trained to deal with this eventuality. But once the eventuality is ongoing, these folks can’t help but fall apart. Nothing like a nuclear warhead headed to a major American city, with possibly more on the way, to hand you “the center cannot hold” on a platter.
This review was filed from the world premiere at the Venice Film Festival. It opens in limited released on October 10, 2025, on Netflix on October 24.
