Movie Review: A House of Dynamite

The pitch on A House of Dynamite may seem a little weird on its face. The movie is a nuclear war film where no actual nuke goes off and the entire film is set over the course of the same approximately twenty minutes told from three different perspectives. It may also seem a little weird to say that this film with an incredibly niche format is easily one of the most riveting movies of 2025.

In a movie that could easily be considered a work of political fantasy today, Idris Elba, Jared Harris, Rebecca Ferguson, Greta Lee, Moses Ingram, and Jason Clarke (among many, many others) star as a series of competent US Government officials who are all trying to figure out the government's best course of action as a nuclear missile is launched from an unknown source towards an American city.

The biggest issue with this movie is breaking it up into three retellings of the same scenario, something that was also a bit weird in Ridley Scott's The Last Duel a few years back. Considering the greatest strength of the movie comes from the way it builds tension and uses the ticking clock towards an impending tragedy as almost a character, the film probably would have been better just jumping back and forth between the various cast members. That would add an additional level of frantic energy that is constant, rather than broken up each time the plot resets to show the next batch of cast members.

There is a case to be made that this movie probably would have been better served as a limited series because some of the thematic issues can get bogged down in weird decisions that work in the movie as long as they're not thought about once the movie ends. The entire conceit of the movie is that the United States has no idea who fired the missile, yet the only thing anyone seems to be focused on once the anti-missile defenses fail is retribution. Who exactly is there to retaliate against? They're just going to trust the adversaries to tell the truth about whether or not they fired the missile?

There is a case to be made that maybe that's the point of the movie, which is attributing a deeper reading than "nuclear war bad :(" which is fundamentally what it is on the surface, but with the truncated timeline, the fact that the movie cannot physically go past the moment before the nuke presumably goes off to tell us what happens next, the movie does not play with these questions with the depths required to make it meaningful. The contingencies that Jacob Elordi gives the president sound bad, but who are we striking, where, and why? Is it disproportionate? We just don't know beyond it's probably against someone who may not have fired the missile in the first place.

So if the current political nightmare scenario we all wake up in every morning is a bit much, check out some escapism with A House of Dynamite, where you can see government competence in a fantasy world, even when things are going wrong in the most horrific way imaginable. The biggest disappointment to be had with this movie is that it did not get a wide theatrical release.

★★★★