Editor’s note: The following contains spoilers for ‘A House of Dynamite’Kathryn Bigelow‘s A House of Dynamite has been the talk of the movie world since it was released on Netflix. Even the Pentagon had something to say about it! With films like The Hurt Locker, Zero Dark Thirty, and Detroit, Bigelow is a master at crafting tension in portrayals of real-life events. Although what happens in A House of Dynamite, with a nuclear missile heading toward Chicago, thankfully never occurred in reality, it feels almost like we’re watching a documentary or found footage. Still, as excruciating as it is to witness, one scene involving Jared Harris is even more shocking than the potential destruction of millions of people.
Jared Harris Plays the Secretary of Defense in ‘A House of Dynamite’
A House of Dynamite might have a large-scale premise of a nuclear missile headed for America, but its focus is smaller. Rather than the predictable disaster movie tropes of citizens screaming as they run through the streets, and stereotypical bad guys and tough heroes, we are placed in small confines around members of the U.S. government. This includes Idris Elba as the President, Tracey Letts as a General, and Rebecca Ferguson as a Captain in the White House Situation Room.
Jared Harris comes in as the Secretary of Defense Reid Baker. With the National Security Advisor not around and POTUS unavailable to be on video, a lot of eyes fall on Baker as the minutes tick down. He’s not portrayed as a rugged military man, but Baker is shown to be overwhelmed and scared, especially when he learns that the missile is headed straight for Chicago, where his daughter, Caroline (Kaitlyn Dever), lives.
Secretary Baker Ends His Life After a Phone Call With His Daughter
Reid Baker is a man in immense pain long before a nuclear attack appears on radar. He’s a widower, having recently lost his wife, and there’s some unresolved tension between him and Caroline. With the destruction of Chicago imminent, Secretary Baker calls his daughter who, not knowing what’s happening, suggests that they still stay apart.
Rather than warning her about the bomb and her need to run, Baker says nothing about it because there is no time for her to escape. He doesn’t want Caroline’s last minutes to be filled with terror, so Reid instead talks about life. When he hears a man talking in the background and Caroline reveals that it’s a serious new boyfriend, her father smiles with pride. He is a broken man, yet his child has been able to overcome the loss of her mother and find love. She doesn’t know that she’s about to die, but when it happens, Caroline won’t be alone.
Still, this isn’t enough to keep going. In fact, it signals his end. When a helicopter lands on the roof to take him to a bunker, Reid Baker heads to it, but without stopping, without even slowing down or hesitating, he walks straight off the roof to his death.
In an interview with The Wrap, Jared Harris spoke about his character’s death scene, saying:
“He didn’t want to live in a world where he’d lost his wife and his daughter. The idea of that was just too distressing. My particular storyline is the most explicit, thematically, about the idea that these are just individual human beings who are put in the position to make choices that will affect millions of lives.”
This Scene Captures the Hopelessness Better Than a Mushroom Cloud
Harris also gave his thoughts on Baker’s death scene to The Wrap, adding, “We just hear that some kerfuffle has happened, someone is screaming, ‘Oh, my God.’ But we don’t know what’s going on.” Both his last call with his daughter and his suicide scene work so well because Bigelow does a lot with so little. Denying us scenes of father and child fighting, it’s what’s unsaid that says it all. The same goes for Baker’s demise. Other movies may have shown Baker dramatically balling up his fists and crying. Perhaps he’d walk to the edge of the roof and stop, looking over as others begged him to step back, before he said something profound and jumped. Instead, we get the slightest look of resolve on his face and a straight walk. Someone sees it and screams, but then it’s over, with no time to comprehend what we just witnessed. It’s such a quick moment that the President himself doesn’t even see it happen.
This is not the first, or even the second time, Jared Harris has played a character who took his own life. It’s happened twice before, when he played Lane Pryce in Mad Men and Valery Legasov in Chernobyl. Harris told The Wrap:
“Legasov was making a statement. It was his way of provoking and making a protest. And his radiation poisoning was so severe that he was dying soon anyway. Lane Pryce did it as an act of revenge. He wanted to make life really uncomfortable for his colleagues, because they’d sort of abandoned him.”
Secretary Baker’s death in A House of Dynamite made its own statement. This is not a body count movie with people shown being burned alive and dying in graphic ways. Instead, the film stops before the bomb ever goes off, leaving us to wonder what will happen next. The scene of mass carnage hasn’t happened yet, but we don’t need to see it. It has already started with Reid Baker. If one of the most powerful men in the world could walk off a building without a second thought because he couldn’t stand to live without the person he loved, what does that mean for the rest of us? In A House of Dynamite, we don’t need to witness the impact to see a disaster right before our eyes.
A House of Dynamite is now available to stream on Netflix in the U.S.
- Release Date
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October 10, 2025
- Runtime
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113 minutes
- Director
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Kathryn Bigelow
