‘A House of Dynamite’ Had to End That Way, Like It or Not

Spoilers ahead for the end of A House of Dynamite , which is now streaming on Netflix.

So yeah, that’s how A House of Dynamite ends. After cycling back through the same 20-minute crisis three times from different corners of the American national-security apparatus, the film cuts away at the crucial moment, just before the president (Idris Elba) orders his response to a mysterious nuclear missile that has slipped through the country’s defenses and will soon destroy Chicago. We don’t see the projectile’s impact, nor the U.S.’s retaliation, nor the world’s reaction to that retaliation. Whether the situation escalates into global annihilation or cools into a détente is left ambiguous. Instead, the film closes somewhere in Pennsylvania, where scores of designated survivors are piling int