“A House of Dynamite”, on Netflix: locomotive film in the nuclear age | Directed by Kathryn Bigelow

A dynamite house – 8 points

(A House of Dynamite; United States, 2025)

Address: Kathryn Bigelow.

Script: Noah Oppenheim.

Duration: 112 minutes.

Interpreters: Idris Elba, Rebecca Ferguson, Gabriel Basso, Jared Harris, Tracy Letts, Anthony Ramos.

Available on Netflix.

The golden era of atomic fear, In the midst of the Cold War, it caused all kinds of fear and paranoia in the world population, the logic and nonsense. The cinema echoed these anxieties with titles of greater or lesser interest, but there are two feature films, released within months of each other in 1964, that marked an entire generation of viewers: the satire of Stanley Kubrick Dr. Unusual and the very serious Safety limitdirected with a firm hand for dramatic tension by Sidney Lumet.

If there is a movie from which A house of dynamite it feels heiress It is precisely the latter, in which the president of the United States embodied by Henry Fonda had to make a serious decision after an error caused by its own air force. Times have changed and now the potus He has dark skin and the face of Idris Elba, But the dilemma is similar: what to do in the face of a nuclear bomb threat with prospects of disaster? Counterattack and climb the situation to infinity or wait a logical amount of time until we have more certainty? In the words of an advisor to the government leader, capitulate or commit suicide?

The character played by Elba does not appear on screen until the last third of the new film Kathryn Bigelow, specialist in nervous stories where the springs of genre cinema – particularly suspense and political thrillers – take on overtones of realism almost insurmountable, as clearly demonstrated The darkest night y Detroit: conflict zonetwo of his most recent films. From a script by Noah Oppenheim surgically precise, the Californian director returns to the same fifteen or twenty minutes of narrative time thanks to three different points of view, all of them close to or immersed in the leadership of the military and political power of the United States.

The alarm is the same: a nuclear-tipped missile fired on land or sea from the other side of the world, whose trajectory advances unceremoniously towards North American soil. Was it the North Koreans, the Russians, the Chinese? Impossible to know. The certainty is that the only possibility of stopping it is using an (apparently) sophisticated ballistic destruction system.

A house of dynamitewhose symbolic title is explained through a clear and sadly true allegory, is a movie-locomotive that never stops, moving forward and backward in time without losing speed. Although, in the end, it is revealed to be an ensemble story, the first segment of the film stars a certain Olivia Walker (Rebecca Ferguson), military security specialist captain who arrives at work after saying goodbye to her husband and young son. But that day, except for the cup of coffee in his hands, nothing will be common and ordinary, not even that seemingly routine alarm that quickly transforms into a major threat. On the monitors of the control center, the characters who will later take control of the plot will appear one by one: the director of the Pentagonthe head of the Armed Forces, an advisor on North Korean politics, an expert in negotiations at the highest levels and, of course, the president.

He proposed, credible and disturbing, It’s simple: the probability of an escalation of nuclear bombs passing through the atmosphere in the direction of the world’s large cities is not as low as one might think, and the mechanisms designed to avoid that possibility could fail, one by one, without the possibility of putting cold cloths or reducing the consequences of the scenario. The film is, at the same time, a remarkable story of political-military suspense and a fable with a transparent moral (the English term “cautionary tale” is even more precise). The end of A house of dynamite may not have the power of Safety limit –with its frozen frames of daily activities before the catastrophe– but it also leaves the skin crawling and a very bitter taste in the mouth.

Trailer: