Venice Film Festival 2025: Terrifying, Dynamic ‘A House of Dynamite’ Proves Kathryn Bigelow Is Back In Superb ‘Zero Dark Thirty’ Form

There have been many films made about the possibility of nuclear war, but none have ever felt quite as urgent and plausible as Kathryn Bigelow’s wildly captivating, completely terrifying new thriller A House of Dynamite.

The film could easily play on a bill with Yorgos Lanthimos’s Bugonia as a glaring warning to our species to take notice of the mess we have made and do something to fix it. But how likely is that? Certain world leaders will probably shrug Bigelow’s film off as alarmist science fiction despite how well researched and feasible it may be.

Regardless, it’s truly great, pulse pounding filmmaking that hooks you from the get-go, chronicles the moments before a nuclear missile is set to hit the U.S. from 3 different perspectives.

Honestly the less you know going in the more exciting the experience will be– I won’t give away any spoilers.

Bigelow wastes no time in dropping the audience directly into the crisis as U.S. intel discovers that a single missile has been launched and is headed towards the Midwest. But no one seems to be able to determine where it was launched from and the powers-that-be have 20 minutes to figure out where it came from and how to respond.

Can worldwide annihilation be avoided?

As someone who grew up in the 80s, I remember the constant fear of nuclear war in my child’s mind, and that certainly bled into adulthood. I also had a strange fascination with films that dealt with those themes from the horrific presentations of the aftermath in the TV film, The Day After and the feature Testament to the dystopian depictions in Miracle Mile to the near-miss silliness of WarGames and the scarily timely docu-portrayal of a nuclear power plant accident in The China Syndrome. Death by nukes was never far from my mind.

As the decades passed most of the films made were either post-apocalyptic fare or action-adventure suspense movies.

A House of Dynamite is both a throwback to those worrisome times and a real next level exploration of a type of scenario that is unavoidably in store for us in the future.

It’s been eight years since Bigelow’s last film, the unfairly maligned Detroit, and she returns in full Zero Dark Thirty/Hurt Locker take-no-prisoners cine-mode, proving she’s one of America’s most assured and formidable filmmakers. (How did she not get a directing Oscar nomination for Zero Dark Thirty???)

Working from Noah Oppenheim’s keen, detailed and incisive screenplay, Bigelow’s work here is bold, gutsy and impressively detailed.

The superlative cast is uniformly fantastic, even those actors with little screen time. Led by a deeply affecting Idris Elba as POTUS. they include, Rebecca Ferguson, Greta Lee, Gabriel Basso, Jared Harris, Tracy Letts, Jason Clarke, Renée Elise Goldsberry, Kyle Allen and Jonah Hauer-King—to name a few—all outstanding.

Kirk Baxter’s superlative editing, Barry Ackroyd’s restless camerawork, Jeremy Hindle’s expert production design, Paul N.J. Ottosson’s intense sound design and Volker Bertelmann’s pro-pro-propulsive score are to be commended.

It was a treat seeing Gus Van Sant’s Dead Man’s Wire and A House of Dynamite almost back-to-back, injecting this year’s Venice Film Festival with an explosive jolt of cinematic transcendence but leaving audiences with quite the sobering messages.

A House of Dynamite is In Competition at the Venice Film Festival (and, along with Bugonia, deserves the top honor).

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