Spoilers ahead for the end of A House of Dynamite, which is now streaming on Netflix.
So yeah, that’s how A House of Dynamite ends. After cycling back through the same 20-minute crisis three times from different corners of the American national-security apparatus, the film cuts away at the crucial moment, just before the president (Idris Elba) orders his response to a mysterious nuclear missile that has slipped through the country’s defenses and will soon destroy Chicago. We don’t see the projectile’s impact, nor the U.S.’s retaliation, nor the world’s reaction to that retaliation. Whether the situation escalates into global annihilation or cools into a détente is left ambiguous. Instead, the film closes somewhere in Pennsylvania, where scores of designated survivors are piling into a self-sufficient bunker, presumably to wait out whatever comes next.
Like most of Kathryn Bigelow’s recent work, A House of Dynamite is polarizing. The film saw strong reviews and an 11-minute standing ovation at Venice, only to receive a more tepid response as it proceeded deeper into the festival circuit. The ending fits that trajectory, likely splitting audiences into two camps. For those who resonate with the film’s frequency, it’ll yield something like, Yeah, that makes sense or more likely unsettled silence. Those who don’t will probably view it as a cop-out — which is understandable! But the ending is consistent with the film’s larger design. Bigelow, long drawn to systems on the brink and the people within them, turns her gaze here toward the largely invisible architectures meant to keep the United States (and, by some extension, the world) safe from nuclear catastrophe. Her aim isn’t to dramatize a specific geopolitical conflict so much as retrieve from history a memory that Americans have spent decades repressing: the quiet, ongoing risk of nuclear collapse. Once pushed aside by the supposed “rationality” of the post–Cold War world, that dread is salient once more in an age of irrational and apocalyptic American politics, when the question of whether nuclear peace will hold feels too harrowing to even contemplate.
The film engages with that discomfort from the jump, opening with a blunt table-setter: “At the end of the Cold War, global powers reached the consensus that the world would be better off with fewer nuclear weapons,” reads pulsating text over the ominous droning score. “That era is now over.” Cue the screen-filling fireball, the first and last time A House of Dynamite will actually depict the explosive terror it spends the next 100 minutes anticipating.
What follows is a procedural triptych, each act tracing the same chain of events from different institutional vantage points. The movie takes pains to illustrate how the possible end of the world will begin like any other day. Olivia Walker (a reliably intense Rebecca Ferguson) is tending to her sick son in the early morning before heading to the White House, where she quarterbacks the Situation Room. At STRATCOM, which oversees America’s nuclear-deterrence strategy, General Anthony Brady (Tracy Letts) jokes about last night’s baseball game and asks for more coffee. The president calls his wife and complains about the sole of his shoe before heading off to a girls’ basketball event with Angel Reese. Before long, the radar picks up an unidentified missile. At first, it’s dismissed as a false alarm; test launches happen somewhat regularly. But slowly, the truth settles in. This one’s a real ICBM, and it’s heading toward American airspace.
Each act follows a constellation of characters processing this revelation in real time, their fear mediated by screens and readouts. Countermeasures are launched. One fails to ignite; the other misses the target. Gradually, they come to grasp the frailty of the systems they’ve relied upon all these years, settling into a quiet dread even as they keep performing their duties with the world on the brink. Soon, it becomes clear that Chicago is the target, where the impact will kill millions. The source of the strike is never confirmed. There’s a sense it could be North Korea, perhaps Russia. Jake Baerington (Gabriel Basso), the deputy national-security adviser, tries to glean more information from his Russian counterpart, but there simply isn’t enough time within the 20-minute stretch to pierce through the fog of war. That the film introduces the possibility the missile might prove to be a dud further deepens its sense of uncertainty, sharpening the fear and chaos around the decision-making process. Without time to fully verify the threat, the machine of protocol lurches into motion. Some personnel are shuttled to safe zones while information moves up the chain to the president, who faces the impossible decision: whether to retaliate, risking escalation, or hold back, risking vulnerability. It’s the heart of nuclear illogic, the instant when mutually assured destruction stops being a deterrent and becomes a trap.
Click here to preview your posts with PRO themes ››
Written by Noah Oppenheim (Jackie, Zero Day), A House of Dynamite is a film of sturdy direction saddled with a clumsy script that delivers exposition with all the subtlety of a falling piano. “I have a daughter in Chicago,” Secretary of Defense Reid Baker (Jared Harris) says aloud at one point in a tense video conference, a line that lands less as dialogue than as a screenwriter’s hand reaching in to plant a biographical detail that will give the film its lone completed character arc; when Baker later kills himself after failing to evacuate his daughter, it’s a little striking in how relatively conventional it feels, given how much of the other characterization unfolds in shorthand. “They’re all narcissists; at least this one reads the newspaper,” a Secret Service agent (Brian Tee) says to the military aide holding the nuclear football (Jonah Hauer-King), clunkily illustrating the virtuousness of Elba’s unnamed president. Humanizing stakes arrive just as bluntly. Baerington’s wife is pregnant. Walker’s colleague William Davis (Malachi Beasley) plans to propose later that day. Still, the script has a crude competence. There’s a meathead quality present in all Bigelow films, and here that simplicity lends the film its procedural gravity. When we first drop in on North Korea intelligence expert Ana Park (Greta Lee), who is spending her day off taking her kid to a Gettysburg reenactment, the metaphor is both obvious and effective: The country’s obsession with war games does not prepare it for the real deal.
Such details may lead the skeptical viewer to interpret the movie as trite, even classically conservative: a portrait of the American defense apparatus run by ordinary citizens doing their best for their country, hoo-rah. Bigelow’s sympathetic eye for her functionaries risks the film being misread as an argument for more robust military funding. There’s also the matter of its depoliticized frame. That it’s never made clear who fired the missile — everyone’s a possible enemy, though it’s strongly suggested that the North Koreans are ultimately responsible — invites charges of jingoism or at least of a soft embrace of American exceptionalism. (Call it the Top Gun: Maverick problem.) Yet something more complicated hums beneath the surface. The notion that the catastrophe stems from inadequate defense spending collapses the moment the interceptors fail. “So it’s a fucking coin toss?” Baker yells when he learns that the antiballistic countermeasures only have around a 60 percent chance of working. “This is what we get for $50 billion?” The line cuts to the heart of the film’s anxiety: not about enemies abroad but the fragility of all the things we’ve built to keep catastrophe at bay. In that sense, the refusal to specify an antagonist carries its own emotional logic. To name an enemy would be to give the audience something to argue with, a reason to keep the fear at arm’s length.
A House of Dynamite works best as a parable, one that strips away the topical and the circumstantial. Its abstraction feels less evasive than connective, demanding engagement with the core fear rather than the distraction of specifics; the threat can no longer be imagined as some specific other: some other government, some other madman. The film makes no argument about how the world may reach nuclear disarmament, but that’s besides the point. It focuses on the nightmare that we even reached this point in the first place, and by ending just before the decisive moment, Bigelow refuses a rational picture of cause and effect. Narratively unsatisfying though it may be, the ending’s abruptness is a natural extension of the apocalyptic anxiety introduced in A House of Dynamite’s opening text: This story isn’t about the end of the world so much as the ease with which we forget its possibility.
