A HOUSE OF DYNAMITE ***1/2
Kathryn Bigelow2025
IDEA: Government officials at all levels scramble to stop a single nuclear missile heading toward the United States.
BLURB: To use another explosives metaphor, A House of Dynamite is a ticking time bomb that never goes off, a doomsday thriller that holds the audience in a nerve-jangling suspension where the end may be in sight but it can never be (fore)seen. This is an existentialist premise Oppenheim and Bigelow boldly fit inside the trappings of a nuts-and-bolts government procedural, whose ostensible real-time elapsing is subverted through structural repetition. The nonlinear triptych storytelling, more than gradually layering in new perspectives and information, has the simultaneous effect of putting us in the shoes of various agents at a single, hasty moment of heart-racing danger and stretching out that moment into a condition of permanent uncertainty. There are about 20 minutes until possible nuclear armageddon, but there’s also that times three, or the nearly two hours of the film’s runtime, but really there’s an indefinite period of potentiality, and A House of Dynamite makes us queasily sit in it. As she does so well, Bigelow creates suspense through a sense of human control slipping away under our own massive apparatuses of power. Her vérité style, marked by Barry Ackroyd’s handheld camera and Kirk Baxter’s fast cutting, captures basically ordinary people negotiating the minutia of a situation that is anything but ordinary. Oppenheim’s script uses a clichéd shorthand to quickly humanize these people (uniformly by giving them spouses or kids), but it’s mostly bracing in how it conveys the impossibility of their professional decision-making, and the contingencies of bureaucracy, technology, and emotion that influence it. A House of Dynamite leaves us with the chilling reality (or is it insanity?) that our lines of defense are not nearly as powerful as our means of destruction.
