A House of Dynamite had its world premiere in the main competition of the 82nd Venice International Film Festival on September 2, 2025, where it was nominated for the Golden Lion.[2] It was released in select cinemas in the United Kingdom on October 3 and was released in the United States on October 10, before its global streaming debut on Netflix on October 24. The film received mixed reviews from critics, who praised the performances of the cast, editing, and sound, but criticized the screenplay.[citation needed]
Plot
The film is non-chronological, showing the same sequence three times from different perspectives. Each part has a separate title.
Walker adds the president and Secretary of Defense Reid Baker to the call; Beijing, Moscow, and Pyongyang deny responsibility for the launch, but deploy their own forces in anticipation of nuclear war.
The first GBI's Exo-atmospheric Kill Vehicle fails to separate from its launch vehicle while the second fails to impact. The ICBM's target is confirmed to be Chicago. DEFCON is raised to level 1, indicating imminent nuclear war. With impact minutes away, Walker allows her colleague SCPO William Davis to break protocol and retrieve their personal phones. Having planned to propose to his girlfriend, Davis urges a White House employee to go home. Walker warns her husband to flee D.C. with their young son.
Hitting a Bullet with a Bullet
General Anthony Brady and his deputy Major General Steven Kyle join the call from the STRATCOM battle deck at Offutt Air Force Base. With the National Security Advisor undergoing surgery, his deputy Jake Baerington is unexpectedly added to the call. Recommending restraint, Baerington admits that the GBI system only has a 61% success rate.
Following the GBIs' failed interception attempt, Brady and the president are simultaneously presented with the handbook of retaliatory nuclear strike options. Brady advises the president to be briefed by his military aide, Lieutenant-Commander Robert Reeves, strongly recommending a combined preemptive nuclear strike to neutralize all possible adversaries. The president's pleas for advice from Baker are met with a whooshing impact sound on the latter's microphone that is explained in the third act.
After imploring the Russian foreign minister to stand down military assets as a matter of mutual trust, Baerington warns the president that global retaliation would be suicide. Brady and Kyle contemplate a decapitation event should they lose contact with the president. With impact approaching, the president confirms his nuclear command authority via the authentication codes on the biscuit, and Brady asks for his orders.
The president is rushed out of a WNBA children's clinic by Secret Service to Andrews Air Force Base with Lieutenant-Commander Reeves and the nuclear football. The recently widowed Baker leaves the call to phone his estranged daughter Carrie in Chicago, but cannot bring himself to warn her. During evacuation from the Pentagon, he commits suicide by walking off the roof.
The president rejoins the call, awaiting his final decision. Rogers and Park are brought to Raven Rock Mountain Complex alongside hundreds of evacuees. Gonzalez kneels outside Fort Greely.
During credits, multiple muffled large explosions are heard, as if from within a bunker.
In June 2025, the film's title was revealed to be A House of Dynamite, with the film scheduled to be given a limited theatrical release in the United States sometime in October 2025 before streaming on Netflix on October 24.[16][17] In August 2025, it was announced that the film would be released in select theaters in the United Kingdom on October 3, 2025, and globally on October 10.[18]
Reception
Critical response
On the review aggregator website Rotten Tomatoes, 75% of 247 critics' reviews are positive.The website's consensus reads: "Playing out a nightmare scenario with nerve-wracking plausibility, Kathryn Bigelow's masterfully-constructed A House of Dynamite is an urgent thriller that's as distressing as it is riveting."[19]Metacritic, which uses a weighted average, assigned the film a score of 75 out of 100, based on 51 critics, indicating "generally favorable" reviews.[20]
Writing for RogerEbert.com, critic Glenn Kenny gave the film four out of four stars, writing that the film is a "tense, precise, extremely sobering thriller" and that Elba's role within it showcased the range of his acting abilities.[21] Pete Hammond for Deadline Hollywood wrote that the film "might not fall into the horror movie genre, but it might as well because it is more frightening than any of them."[22]
Technical criticism
The film has drawn criticism from the U.S. Department of Defense and the subordinate agency responsible for the U.S. missile defense system, the Missile Defense Agency[23], for misstating the reliability of the Ground Based Interceptor (GBI) system, which has an officially recorded success rate of 100% interception, versus 61% depicted in the film.[24] Screenwriter Noah Oppenheim responded by saying that the 100% rate quoted was only for certain recent tests, while the overall success rate for the 20 tests conducted since the system was introduced in 1999, backed up by publicly available data, is 57%, slightly lower than that portrayed in the film.[25]
On the other hand, Ted Postol of MIT's Lincoln Labs, a long time critic of the Missile Defense Agency, praised the film's accuracy and stated the 61% claim was artificially high. In a presentation with retired US Army officer Daniel Davis, Postol broke down how the 61% was calculated and claimed the entire missile defense program is fraudulent.[26] Postol had warned former White House Chief of Staff John Podesta in 2000 not to deploy the anti-ballistic missile (ABM) system then in development, as its success claims may have been based in contractor fraud.[27][28] Fraud in ABM system development is dramatized in the 1998 film Snake Eyes.
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