‘The thing is, it’s hard for me to analyse what I do because I’m always in the moment and trying to move forward.’ Kathryn Bigelow has come to London by train from Paris, where she was being honoured by the Cinémathèque française. ‘I met Costa-Gavras,’ the Cinémathèque’s president, best known as the director of Z (1969). ‘He’s a hero of mine, and I told him, “You invented the political thriller.” You couldn’t do this movie if it hadn’t been for him.’ ‘This movie’ is A House of Dynamite, Bigelow’s first in eight years, and the most sheerly compelling of her career, moving forward with the relentlessness of a rocket.
Bigelow’s career has in fact been a series of forward moves: from art into film, from high style into realism, from fiction into journalism – and indeed, from stasis into motion, spectacle into narrative. Her first feature The Loveless (1981, co-directed with Monty Montgomery), a postmodern biker movie that makes a fetish of 1950s Americana while constantly evoking its violent undertow, ‘was really an effort to suspend the narrative. If it were a piece of music it would be one note. Whereas shooting A House of Dynamite was like four-dimensional chess.’ A nuclear intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM) is bearing down on Chicago and the US military and political leadership have about 18 minutes to try to stop it and to decide on a response. We see the same 18 minutes play out three times, focusing on three sets of characters, but with a great deal of overlap since everyone in the film is in near-constant communication with one another.
‘It was incredibly complex to shoot, and the script [by Noah Oppenheim] was meticulous.’ The momentum is sustained through the repetitions as each one introduces new dimensions to the story. Deeply researched and shot without gloss, A House of Dynamite is the culmination of all of Bigelow’s forward moves, the central pivot in which was The Hurt Locker (2008), a bomb-disposal drama set in Iraq, in which her newfound yen for realism, and for journalism, came together for the first time. She herself calls it a ‘breathtaking transition’; it was also a kind of comeback after K-19: The Widowmaker (2002), a starry and expensive Cold War thriller, set aboard a Russian submarine, that underperformed at the box office. Made on a much lower budget, and shot on 16mm, primarily in Jordan, The Hurt Locker won the Best Picture Oscar, and, for Bigelow personally, the Directing Oscar. She was the first woman to win the award, and the last for more than a decade, but she has never made a big thing of it, whereas she talks about being screened at the Cinémathèque as ‘surreal, an out of body experience’.
The two films that followed The Hurt Locker, Zero Dark Thirty (2012), about the US military’s hunt for Osama Bin Laden, and Detroit (2017), set during the riots of 1967, were in the same vein, and based on historical events, and while A House of Dynamite is speculative, it is likewise based on intimate knowledge of America’s defence establishment. What is new within this phase of Bigelow’s career is A House of Dynamite’s narrative intricacy, its rapid cycling between locations and extensive use of telecommunications. It would not be inaccurate to say that the film’s true location is the ether. In the third act, as the president barrels through Washington DC, we barely notice the sight of his motorcade, and the constant disruption involved in keeping it moving, because the main drama is taking place somewhere on the electromagnetic spectrum; and yet the sequence has the power it possesses because the motorcade is as real as can be. The principals, Bigelow tells me, were in the vehicles, not in the studio.
Still, although A House of Dynamite is highly plausible, and although it is new and distinctively of the 2020s, it is also of a piece with Bigelow’s films before The Hurt Locker and her shift to realism, most obviously Strange Days (1995), which was, after all, an apocalyptic prophecy of the technological near future. For all that she is keen to present A House of Dynamite as an urgent ‘cautionary tale’ for a generation (or two) who have grown up since the Cold War, in relative ignorance of the possibility of instant nuclear annihilation, it can be seen as a vindication of Strange Days’ predictions of an ‘increasingly mediated’ environment, as she described it at the time. The main characters in A House of Dynamite experience the world almost exclusively through screens – we never actually see the ICBM – while they are constantly being looked at through them in turn, and frequently having to authenticate themselves, at the mercy of their devices. The stakes are unusually high, but they are just like us.
Perversely or otherwise, Bigelow’s films from Blue Steel onwards betray a fascination with the protocols of the straight world alongside the desire for unmediated experience manifested by countercultural figures like Point Break’s Bodhi; indeed, some of her most extreme thrill-seekers, such as Jeremy Renner’s character in The Hurt Locker, are feeding their need from within the most tightly routinised parts of the machine.
A House of Dynamite may seem some way distant from these concerns, but its characters are the most governed by protocol of any in Bigelow’s career, as well as the most distanced from real, unmediated experience. And by showing the astounding efforts we have collectively made, as a species, to make nuclear annihilation an ever-present possibility, it is also in keeping with the rest of her films in tracing the lineaments of the death drive beneath modern civilisation’s apparently rational surface. Her response to this? ‘I don’t know, it’s a real reach.’
Henry K. Miller, Sight and Sound, December 2025
A House of Dynamite
Directed by: Kathryn Bigelow
©: Netflix
Production Companies: First Light Productions, Kingsgate Films, Prologue Entertainment
Presented by: Netflix
Executive Producers: Brian Bell, Sarah Bremner
Produced by: Greg Shapiro, Kathryn Bigelow, Noah Oppenheim
Unit Production Manager: Brian Bell
Financial Controller: Steve Guilbaud
Supervising Location Manager: Ryan Smith
Location Manager: Leila Nurse
Post-production Supervisors: Luca Borghese, Luca Borghese
2nd Unit Director: George Cottle
1st Assistant Director: Simon Warnock
Casting by: Susanne Scheel
Written by: Noah Oppenheim
Director of Photography: Barry Ackroyd
2nd Unit Directors of Photography: Eric Moynier, John Garrett
A Camera Operator: Barry Ackroyd
Stills Photography: Eros Hoagland
Visual Effects Supervisor: Chris Harvey
Visual Effects by: Distillery VFX
Special Effects Supervisor: Devin Maggio
Edited by: Kirk Baxter
Production Designer: Jeremy Hindle
Art Director: Ann Bartek
Set Decorator: David Schlesinger
Costume Designer: Sarah Edwards
Department Head Make-up: Jackie Risotto
Department Head Hair: Kerrie Smith
Main and End Titles Designed by: Teddy Blanks
Finishing Colourist: Stephen Nakamura
Colour and Finish by: Company 3
Music by: Volker Bertelmann
Score Performed by: London Contemporary Orchestra
Music Supervisor: George Drakoulias
Sound Design by: Paul N.J. Ottosson
Production Sound Mixer: Thomas Varga
Re-recording Mixer: Paul N.J. Ottosson
Supervising Sound Editor: Paul N.J. Ottosson
Stunt Co-ordinators: George Cottle, Mark Fichera
Thanks: Roeg Sutherland
Cast
Idris Elba (POTUS [US president])
Rebecca Ferguson (Captain Olivia Walker)
Gabriel Basso (Deputy National Security Advisor Jake Baerington)
Jared Harris (Secretary of Defense Reid Baker)
Tracy Letts (General Anthony Brody)
Anthony Ramos (Major Daniel Gonzalez)
Moses Ingram (Cathy Rogers)
Jonah Hauer-King (Lieutenant Commander Robert Reeves)
Greta Lee (Anna Park)
Jason Clarke (Admiral Mark Miller)
Malachi Beasley (SCPO William Davis)
Brian Tee (SAIC Ken Cho)
Brittany O’Grady (Lily Baerington)
Gbenga Akinnagbe (Major General Steven Kyle)
Willa Fitzgerald (Abby Jansing)
Renée Elise Goldsberry (First Lady)
Kyle Allen (Captain Jon Zimmer)
Kaitlyn Dever (Caroline Baker)
USA 2025©
112 mins
Digital
SIGHT AND SOUND
Never miss an issue with Sight and Sound, the BFI’s internationally renowned film magazine. Subscribe from just £25*
*Price based on a 6-month print subscription (UK only). More info: sightandsoundsubs.bfi.org.uk
BFI SOUTHBANK
Welcome to the home of great film and TV, with three cinemas and a studio, a world-class library, regular exhibitions and a pioneering Mediatheque with 1000s of free titles for you to explore. Browse special-edition merchandise in the BFI Shop.We're also pleased to offer you a unique new space, the BFI Riverfront – with unrivalled riverside views of Waterloo Bridge and beyond, a delicious seasonal menu, plus a stylish balcony bar for cocktails or special events. Come and enjoy a pre-cinema dinner or a drink on the balcony as the sun goes down.
BECOME A BFI MEMBER
Enjoy a great package of film benefits including priority booking at BFI Southbank and BFI Festivals. Join today at bfi.org.uk/join
BFI PLAYER
We are always open online on BFI Player where you can watch the best new, cult & classic cinema on demand. Showcasing hand-picked landmark British and independent titles, films are available to watch in three distinct ways: Subscription, Rentals & Free to view.
See something different today on player.bfi.org.uk
Join the BFI mailing list for regular programme updates. Not yet registered? Create a new account at www.bfi.org.uk/signup
Programme notes and credits compiled by Sight and Sound and the BFI Documentation Unit
Notes may be edited or abridged
Questions/comments? Contact the Programme Notes team by email