'A House of Dynamite's Trailer Threatens to Blow Up the Earth

It is a generally accepted trope that the most effective horror movies are the ones that never show you the monster. It holds for classics like Alien and Rosemary's Baby, and is still used to great effect today in franchises like A Quiet Place. However, one of Netflix's most significant October debuts is terrifying not because it's debuting during "Spooky Season," but because it's not billed as a horror movie at all. A House of Dynamite, the latest film from Academy Award-winning director Kathryn Bigelow, has been called everything from a war film to a political thriller. But the trailer promises it to be the scariest movie to arrive for Halloween 2025.

Bigelow is famous for her war films; before she earned her Oscar for the 2008 Iraq War film, The Hurt Locker, she directed K-19: The Widowmaker; her 2013 film Zero Dark Thirty, about the assassination of Osama Bin Laden, also earned a slew of nominations. A House of Dynamite technically falls within the same genre, set within the war rooms of the White House and the major command control centers for the U.S. military.

However, unlike Bigelow's previous films, which focused on the day-to-day horrors of war, A House of Dyamite takes a more expansive view. What happens when nuclear war is about to break out?

The logline, like the trailer, is more interesting for what it doesn't tell you than what it does:

When a single, unattributed missile is launched at the United States, a race begins to determine who is responsible and how to respond.

However, with the film having premiered at the 2025 Venice International Film Festival as the start of its award season campaign, we now know a little more about it and why one of its biggest stars, Idris Elba (Luther), does not show up in any of the promotional images of the trailer.

A House of Dynamite is filmed as a triptych, in which each section covers the same events, each from a different perspective. The first third takes place in the White House Situation Room, where Majors, Admirals, and Captains sweat out the missile's trajectory from the safety of their bunker. This is the part that stars Rebecca Ferguson (Dune), along with Americans Jason Clarke (Oppenheimer) and Anthony Ramos (In the Heights).

The middle section rewinds to the start and retells the story from the perspective of those at the U.S. Strategic Command Center (STRATCOM), where the actual boots on the ground are confronted with the very real possibility that they're all about to be deployed to drop nukes on innocent people. This part features primarily American actors, including Tracy Letts (Little Women), Brittany O’Grady (The White Lotus), and Gabriel Basso (The Night Agent).

The final section is told entirely from the point of view of the President of the United States, played by Elba. Ironically, this final segment, which once again rewinds to the top of the day, so Elba can have his own My Pet Goat moment, is led primarily by British actors with Jared Harris (Foundation) as the Secretary of Defense and Jonah Hauer-King (World on Fire) as the Army's liaison to the president.

The film's supporting cast also includes American actors Moses Ingram (The Tragedy of Macbeth), Kaitlyn Dever (The Last of Us), Greta Lee (Miracle Workers), Gbenga Akinnagbe (Elementary), Willa Fitzgerald (Little Women), Kyle Allen (A Haunting in Venice), Brian Tee (Expats), Renée Elise Goldsberry (Girls5eva), and newcomer Malachi Beasley, in his feature debut.

Kathryn Bigelow directs from a script written by Noah Oppenheim (Zero Day). Both are executive producers on the project alongside Greg Shapiro, Brian Bell, and Sarah Bremner. Conclave's Volker Bertelmann composed the soundtrack.

A House of Dynamite will play the film festival circuit before its limited release debut in the U.K. on Friday, October 3. It will follow in "select theaters" in the U.S. (aka New York & Los Angeles) a week later, on Friday, October 10, before moving to streaming on Netflix starting Friday, October 24, 2025.