The ending of House Of Dynamite will infuriate a lot of people – but it’s the best possible choice

Warning: this article will contain spoilers for “A House of Dynamite”.

Kathryn Bigelow’s new film, “A House of Dynamite,” is a concise triptych of tense stories that all cover the same time period. This happens the morning an unknown foreign entity launches a nuclear missile from an unknown location. As the missile heads toward the United States, audiences see the White House Situation Room, a distant military base, various politicians and pundits, and the president himself responding to the crisis. The first 35 minutes or so of the film show what the emergency is like at the White House, mostly seen through the eyes of senior executive Olivia Walker (Rebecca Ferguson). Panic mounts when they realize that the nuclear missile is heading straight for Chicago and that it will be very, very difficult to shoot it down. The head of the missile defense station in Alaska is Daniel Gonzalez (Anthony Ramos) who started the day stressed.

The second part of the film primarily follows a high-ranking STRATCOM officer (Tracy Letts) and a lower-ranking security officer (Gabriel Basso) as they think through the situation tactically. No one knows who launched the missile, or who to retaliate against. Part three follows the president (Idris Elba), who is ill-prepared to make a life-or-death decision on this issue, because it could literally mean the fate of the world.

However, all three parts of the film end just seconds before the missile attack. Did the missile explode? What would the consequences be? “A House of Dynamite” leaves the audience in a state of flux, floating freely in uninterrupted tension. Bigelow deliberately doesn’t let the story resolve itself. Some may find this annoying, of course, but the unresolved ending reveals what “A House of Dynamite” really is… and it’s very dark: our processes, no matter how refined, cannot prevent the inevitable mass destruction of the world.

It’s worth noting that “A House of Dynamite” suffers from poor release timing, making the film feel somewhat dated. The current presidential administration’s cabinet is filled with pundits and podcasters who appear potentially incompetent. “A House of Dynamite,” while a terse drama about the end of the world, can also serve as a comforting fantasy about an American government that works the way it’s supposed to. The film is full of smart, determined, and knowledgeable employees who all want the best for the world. It’s an idealized version of a presidential administration, even one that deals with the End Times.

But even though the characters on screen are capable and intelligent, they have nothing in their mental arsenal to deal with the inevitable destruction of the world. A missile is heading towards Chicago. It seems increasingly likely that it will breach our defenses and land in a city of 2.7 million people. No one in the government can determine whether the missile was Russian, Chinese, Korean or from another country.

The crux of “A House of Dynamite” is our powerlessness in the face of the destruction of the world. For those who have seen “Oppenheimer” in 2023, we know that humanity, through much hard work, ingenuity and tenacity, has created a device capable of rapidly and violently wiping out the world’s population. This movie takes place in the 1940s. Fast forward 80 years, and we only have more. Various national powers possess this technology. We don’t attack each other simply because retaliation would end the Earth. As the title suggests, we all live in houses filled with dynamite.

These concepts are of course not new. Children of the Cuban Missile Crisis probably remember the fog of nuclear death that hung over the nation. Likewise, children raised in Ronald Reagan’s America may remember the strangely pervasive nuclear fears that gripped the nation; it seemed almost inevitable that either the United States or Russia would bomb the other. We can see the fears ridiculed in films like “RoboCop” in which nuclear conflagration was reduced to a veritable board game.

But “A House of Dynamite” also isn’t about specific world powers, or their relationship with the United States. The movie doesn’t end with a conclusive “bad guy,” and we don’t know how many people die (if any; it’s been rumored that the bomb might be a dud). A death toll, however, would have seemed crude in “A House of Dynamite.” Additionally, blaming a specific world power would have infused Bigelow’s film with an “Us versus Them” mentality, reducing the film to partisan politics and a simplistic Bad Guy narrative. If the audience had witnessed a real counterattack, it would have been just a modern war film, without nuance.

The lack of an ending on “A House of Dynamite” was a wise and intelligent choice. Expert Bigelow makes us, the audience, face the horror of the nuclear situation without giving us the comforting chauvinism of rooting against a bad guy. Indeed, because an enemy power is not identified, the antagonist of the film becomes the nuclear weapon in general. The villain is the world’s tense, deadly obsession with amassing bombs, and the high tensions we maintain to keep them drawn against each other. The president cannot be blamed for being indecisive in times of crisis, because there are no good decisions.

“A House of Dynamite” will be released in select theaters on October 10, before streaming worldwide on Netflix on October 24, 2025.