A House of Dynamite review: Netflix’s new nuclear war thriller is terrifying | Films | Entertainment
Almost a decade on from her last movie and Kathryn Bigelow is back with another incredibly realistic geo-political thriller, complete with shaky cam.
The Oscar-winner stunned the world with The Hurt Locker and Zero Dark Thirty, and she’s done it again with A House of Dynamite over at Netflix.
This time around, the acclaimed director teams up with Zero Day’s Noah Oppenheim in this resurrection of the edge-of-your-seat, brink-of-nuclear-war genre that was most prevalent in the 1980s.
In 2025, the Doomsday Clock has never been closer to midnight, and now J Robert Oppenheimer’s “What have I unleashed?” final shot of Christopher Nolan’s biopic manifests in A House of Dynamite’s chilling What If?
The terrifying real-time plot follows US government officials waking up one morning to discover a nuclear missile has been launched by a mystery enemy and is headed for Chicago. They have just 18 minutes to respond. A House of Dynamite is split into three chapters telling the same story from different perspectives up to the moment of impact. The ensemble cast is led by Idris Elba’s US President (with a slightly dodgy American accent), Rebecca Ferguson’s White House Situation Room officer and Jared Harris’s Secretary of Defence, who all try to remain professional whilst understandably being personally affected by the impending doom.
The film’s intense narrative is masterfully made all the more devastating by Volker Bertelmann’s harrowing score, the Oscar-winning composer behind the one in All Quiet on the Western Front. Moral conundrums and concerns over the lack of preparedness in an incident that could happen at any moment in real life are explored throughout. All the while, one hopes our actual world leaders have given such dread-inducing scenarios that could lead to total annihilation more than a passing thought. An important and nail-biting apocalyptic nightmare.
A House of Dynamite is streaming now on Netflix.
