Kathryn Bigelow’s A House of Dynamite lit up the screen at the Venice Film Festival on Tuesday night as the Netflix action pic had its world premiere inside Sala Grande.
The audience gave the nuclear disaster thriller an enthusiastic thumbs up with an extended 11-minute standing ovation. Amid chants of “bravo,” Bigelow clasped her hands and bowed her head with gratitude as cast members like Idris Elba and Rebecca Ferguson embraced their filmmaker. “Thank you,” Bigelow said as she soaked in the reception. “Wow.”
Bigelow’s Netflix film, penned by Noah Oppenheim (Zero Day, Jackie), tells the story of what happens when a single, unattributed missile is launched at the United States, leading to a race begins to determine who is responsible and how to respond. Elba, Ferguson, Gabriel Basso, Jared Harris, Tracy Letts, Anthony Ramos, Moses Ingram, Jonah Hauer-King, Greta Lee and Jason Clarke star in the film that opens in select theaters Oct. 3 in the U.K., globally Oct. 10, and on Netflix Oct. 24.
The film marks Bigelow’s first since 2017’s Detroit, and follows earlier work like Zero Dark Thirty, The Hurt Locker, K-19: The Widowmaker, The Weight of Water and Strange Days. And she was welcomed with open arms here in Venice. After she made her way down the wall of photographers, as she neared the end, a crush of attendees — a group filled with filmmakers, actors, agents, managers and Netflix executives — broke out with an impromptu applause. Fans lining the barricade also chanted, “Kathy, Kathy, Kathy!”
In her festival director’s statement she recalled how growing up in an era when hiding under the desk was considered “go-to protocol” for surviving an atomic bomb while present times have delivered a much more stark reality.
“It seems absurd now — and it was — but at the time, the threat felt so immediate that such measures were taken seriously. Today, the danger has only escalated. Multiple nations possess enough nuclear weapons to end civilisation within minutes. And yet, there’s a kind of collective numbness — a quiet normalization of the unthinkable,” she explained. “How can we call this ‘defense’ when the inevitable outcome is total destruction? I wanted to make a film that confronts this paradox — to explore the madness of a world that lives under the constant shadow of annihilation, yet rarely speaks of it.”
In the film’s official festival press conference in the afternoon Tuesday, Bigelow shared her fascination and confusion over the use of nuclear weapons. “Hopefully the film is an invitation to decide what to do about all these weapons,” Bigelow stated. “My answer would be to initiate a reduction in the nuclear stockpile. How is annihilating the world a good defensive measure?”
She continued by saying that the hope is the reduction of the nuclear stockpile “one day” while in the meantime, “we are really living in a house of dynamite.”
The Venice Film Festival runs Aug. 27-Sept. 6.
Tracy Letts, Greta Lee, Idris Elba, Kathryn Bigelow, Rebecca Ferguson, Anthony Ramos, Gabriel Basso and Jared Harris attend the ‘A House Of Dynamite’ photocall during the 82nd Venice Film Festival on Sept. 2, 2025.
(Photo by Vittorio Zunino Celotto/Getty Images)
