‘A House of Dynamite’ Review: Kathryn Bigelow’s Ticking Clock Thriller Fumbles Its Own Time (Netflix)
The ‘Zero Dark Thirty’ director turns a twenty-minute nuclear crisis into an intense, real-time thriller — then replays it twice from different angles, draining its own suspense. Despite strong performances and unrelenting tension, its time-loop structure undermines what could have been a much more gripping film.
Kathryn Bigelow builds tension like few directors can, and from the very first minute A House of Dynamite grips the viewer with an escalating sense of dread. But a strange and ultimately misguided narrative choice undercuts much of that carefully built adrenaline. Set during the brief, terrifying window between the discovery of a possible nuclear strike and its uncertain outcome, the film could have unfolded as a straightforward, real-time thriller. Instead, Bigelow and screenwriter Noah Oppenheim opt for a fractured, looping structure meant to be thematically ambitious, but which ends up shooting itself in the foot.
That’s not to say A House of Dynamite isn’t a nerve-wracking experience. For its first forty minutes, it plays like a near–real-time chronicle of an impending nuclear crisis, suffocating the audience with its ticking-clock intensity. The story covers no more than twenty minutes of “real” time, doubled through cinematic tension and overlapping perspectives. But rather than using parallel subplots to fill those stretched minutes, Bigelow and Oppenheim divide the film into three sections, each retelling the same twenty-minute event from a slightly different point of view.
It’s an ambitious idea that quickly turns repetitive. Once we’ve seen the first version of events, the other two inevitably feel redundant, draining away suspense with every retread. The intention is clear — to show unseen angles and hidden motives — but the differences are not that revealing and characters aren’t compelling enough to justify revisiting the same scenario again and again. The script struggles to keep the narrative fresh, replaying the same sequences and incidents from the perspective of another “camera” inside a vast government command network managing the crisis.
The premise itself is simple and effective: a missile launched from the Pacific Ocean is heading toward the United States. The authorities detect it and scramble to respond, with less than twenty minutes to prevent catastrophe. But their defensive systems are unreliable, and no one knows who fired the missile or why. Without that information, there’s no possibility of negotiation — or retaliation. Within this narrow time frame, A House of Dynamite follows a dozen government officials trying to make impossible decisions as the missile speeds toward Chicago, threatening ten million lives.
The ensemble is large and solidly cast. Rebecca Ferguson plays a White House “Situation Room” commander juggling duty and motherhood. Jason Clarke shares command duties beside her. Anthony Ramos oversees missile deployment from a remote base. Jared Harris, as the Secretary of Defense, adds a human dimension as a father whose daughter lives in Chicago. The President himself remains unseen until the third act, but his distinctive voice makes it obvious he’s played by Idris Elba. Elba’s negotiator, portrayed by Gabriel Basso, and Tracy Letts’s gruff military commander take center stage in the later retellings of the same twenty minutes — though their repeated actions blur the dramatic impact.
The film’s tension is relentless, filled with rapid-fire military jargon (EKV, GBI, DEFCON, STRATCOM, and more) that requires constant decoding. Viewed against the backdrop of current global anxieties, it feels disturbingly plausible. Bigelow understands that in a situation like this, there are no good options — only shades of horror. Yet she frames it all as an “unprovoked attack” on the U.S., missing an opportunity to explore the broader, more ambiguous realities of contemporary geopolitics.
Still, without its narrative gimmick, A House of Dynamite might have been a taut, gripping thriller — one that balanced blockbuster spectacle with genuine moral weight. The film clearly aims for a Christopher Nolan-style temporal complexity, but never finds a meaningful payoff for it. Little of what’s revealed in the second and third versions adds much to what we already know after the first. The message remains the same: if one world leader wakes up on the wrong side of the bed someday, we’re all doomed.
