Kathryn Bigelow Lights the Fuse with “A House of Dynamite”

By Laurence Lerman / New York City

Kathryn Bigelow at the New York Film Festival in September

SCREEN TIME

In the pantheon of 21st-century auteurs, Kathryn Bigelow has quietly carved a domain for herself in terrain long presumed the preserve of male directors: the world of warfare, violence, political brinksmanship, and high-stakes moral confrontation. Bigelow’s new film, A House of Dynamite, marks her return after an eight-year hiatus; it is a film that seems custom-made to remind us exactly why she matters.

For nearly four decades, Kathryn Bigelow has made a career out of detonating expectations. The first woman ever to win the Academy Award for Best Director (for 2008’s The Hurt Locker, also that year’s Best Picture winner), she’s spent her life proving that no genre—least of all the muscular, testosterone-fueled world of action and war films—is off-limits to a woman with vision and steel. From the surfer-bank robber ballet of Point Break to the nerve-shredding realism of The Hurt Locker and Detroit, and the cold procedural precision of Zero Dark Thirty, Bigelow has been a master of cinematic pressure. Her characters live for the split second before everything explodes. And when that explosion comes, it’s never just about violence—it’s about who we become when time runs out.

Jon Zimmer and Kyle Allen take flight into a dangerous scenario in A House of Dynamite

A House of Dynamite’s title couldn’t be more fitting. This is a film wired to blow up, a 21st-century nuclear thriller that unfolds in near real time and practically hums with anxiety. The setup is simple: a single missile has been launched toward the United States. Its origin is unknown; its target appears to be Chicago. From that point on and from three different points of view, the film tracks the excruciating 20 minutes between detection and possible detonation, as the government scrambles to identify the threat and decide whether to retaliate and avoid global annihilation.

It’s a startlingly terrifying but quite simple, and with her renowned precision, director Bigelow makes it feel new. She turns what could have been a procedural exercise into a study of chaos barely contained by professionalism. The movie opens in silence—an anonymous radar blip in the Pacific—and ends with the world holding its breath. Between those points lies the most tightly wound hour and a half you’re likely to see all year.

Rebecca Ferguson does her best to diffuse a dangerous situation

Idris Elba stars as the President, calm on the surface but visibly unraveling beneath the weight of every decision. Rebecca Ferguson, as the communications officer who becomes the film’s moral center, delivers a performance so taut it’s almost painful to watch. Jared Harris plays the Secretary of Defense as a man haunted by Cold War ghosts, while Jason Clarke and Greta Lee round out an ensemble that radiates exhaustion, dread and brittle authority. Bigelow has always had a gift for assembling actors who look like they haven’t slept in days—people you believe were living inside these decisions long before the camera started rolling.

What separates A House of Dynamite from the typical disaster film is Bigelow’s refusal to indulge in spectacle. The real explosions here are verbal, ethical, emotional. The editing is razor-sharp, yet the pacing feels organic, pulsing like a quickening heartbeat. She shoots command centers and radar rooms as if they’re battlegrounds, full of light flicker and half-heard commands. When she finally cuts to the missile itself—a faint white streak across a black sky—it lands like a gut punch, not a special effect.

Tracy Letts (left) leads the Department of Defense's Strategic Command

The film fits squarely within a lineage that includes Dr. Strangelove, Fail Safe, Twilight’s Last Gleaming, and, hell, even WarGames, yet it feels unmistakably contemporary. Those thrillers were reflective of a Cold War mindset, while Bigelow and screenwriter Noah Oppenheim’s film? Movie? is more about concerned with information—how quickly it moves, how easily it breaks, and how dangerous uncertainty has become. Nobody in this film knows exactly what’s happening, and that’s what makes it terrifying. The tension doesn’t come from explosions but from the spaces between: a paused transmission, a locked stare, the hum of silence after a line goes dead.

Bigelow’s earlier films examined soldiers and spies addicted to adrenaline. A House of Dynamite studies a different addiction—the illusion of control. Every character believes they can manage catastrophe if they just work faster, decide smarter, think harder. But the movie keeps tightening the screws until intellect becomes another form of panic. There’s no villain here, no evil mastermind, just flawed people trying to do the right thing before the world disappears.

Eight years after the underseen Detroit, Bigelow hasn’t softened. She’s leaner, meaner, and still allergic to complacency. A House of Dynamite is broad and intimate at once—a movie about the end of the world that somehow feels personal. It’s the work of a filmmaker who still believes that cinema can be both urgent and alive, that tension itself is a kind of truth.

And that’s because when Kathryn Bigelow lights the fuse, you don’t sit back and watch. You hold your breath, waiting for the blast.

“A House of Dynamite” opened in theaters in the U.S. on October 10 and will be streaming on Netflix on October 24.

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Laurence Lerman is a film journalist, a former editor of Video Business--Variety's digital media trade publication—and husband to The Insider's own Gwen Cooper. Over the course of his four-decade career, he has conducted one-on-one interviews with just about every major filmmaker working today, from Martin Scorsese, Quentin Tarantino and Clint Eastwood to Kathryn Bigelow, Bernardo Bertolucci, and Werner Herzog. Most recently, he is the co-founder and editor-in-chief of the online review site DiscDish.com, the founder and curator of FilmShul.com, a multi-part presentation on the history of Hollywood and Jewish America, and a commentator on various 4K UHD and Blu-ray home entertainment releases.