Why ‘A House of Dynamite’ Is Shaking Hollywood
Kathryn Bigelow and Netflix have tonight lifted the curtain on A House of Dynamite at the Venice Film Festival, marking the Oscar-and-Director-Guild triumphant return of the restless filmmaker after an eight-year feature pause.
The tension-fed nuclear parable begins at the instant an unmapped missile screams toward the United States. From that moment an information drag race kicks into gear: who pressed the button, and more urgently, how do the living reply.
Headliners Idris Elba and Rebecca Ferguson are joined by star-packed support from Gabe Basso, Jared Harris, Tracy Letts, Anthony Ramos, Moses Ingram, and others, the entire drama framed by a script from Noah Oppenheim. Venice’s promotional stills flash proof that the atmosphere is, as ever, meticulously curated down to every collar, throat, and radar beam.
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Pete Hammond of Deadline throws down the gauntlet, asserting Bigelow “hasn’t lost her mojo” and condemns those who still blink politely at her “nail biting thriller.” The story, he warns, is more documentary than parlour game: flush the synaxes, the entire plot is us as we stall toward a porous and blisteringly detailed spacecraft. Rawlikers rejoice and tremble alike.
The Guardian awards the film a freshly minted five chaparrals, labling it an “immaculate procedural nightmare” and squeezing the sparks into phrases slick as C4. The attack is dazzling, the precision immaculate. A 4-star roster from the BBC imports its “excruciating tension” moods to pipe the aftermath into stark 4K, rounding the short list of critical strength. Bigelow, we have missed the judder.
The Independent handed the film a blistering 4 out of 5, dubbing it “The most entertaining movie about mass destruction since Dr. Strangelove” and summing it up as “a white-knuckle ride” that escalates the suspense to the danger zone before the opening credits are over. Volker Bertelmann’s score, obsessively tense on the strident strings, ensures that the whole theater remains semi-collected, yet ready to jump.
Over at RogerEbert.com, the verdict was similarly glowing: “Bigelow’s gift for converting a chain of hypotheticals into chilling narrative fact has never felt this deadly accurate,” the review states, a surgical remark that compliments the director and the material without fanfare.
The UK-based Daily Telegraph mirrored the score with another 4 out of 5, calling the feature “a hair-raising thriller” and “a razor-sharp procedural that could give Armageddon a run for its crash-course money,” the image of the film as analytics and ticker tape simply tracked once the tape is hot.
GQ chimed in, too, stunned by the craftsmanship and still somewhat skeptically tossing a bone to Oscar omen: “It may be too restrained emotionally for the voters to want it on their mantle, yet the stitching by editor Kirk Baxter is so brilliant you can’t picture any other film nabbing the honor in the cutting bay. As Netflix features go, this sits at the absolute apex of the topology—once it starts you will not, for once, breach immediate-contact with that glowing slab in your palm.”
“At least it’s headed down the right path.”
Hoboken’s last 4/5 star takeaway hails Idris Elba: “He’s deft in the year’s second presidential encore, the first of course being that headline-robbing, Jamaican-accented comedy—and yes, the closing act loses a beat, the earlier half crackling like flossed wire.”
On the producer list you’ll find Shapiro, Bigelow, and Oppenheim, with EP credits sharing the sleeve space of Bell and Bremner. The countdown notes the project as Bigelow’s first theatrical whistle since 2017’s Detroit.
