What’s It About
A family of four are suddenly sealed inside their home with no way out, and must work together to survive against both their dwindling resources and the mysterious, looming threat that is keeping them trapped.
MOVIESinMO REVIEW
I want to start with the good news, because “The Last House” actually has some. Then I have to explain how the ending wrecked most of it. So yes, there are spoilers. Netflix’s new sci-fi thriller drops a regular family into a very strange trap. Jason, played by Wagner Moura, is out of work and loves fishing more than almost anything. His wife Ann, played by Greta Lee, tries to hold the household together while raising their two kids. One evening, a strange rain begins to fall, and the doors will not open. The windows will not break. The glass just heals itself when the family tries to smash a way out. Something outside their home has decided to keep them locked inside it. For close to an hour, this idea actually works. Director Louis Leterrier keeps finding new ways to shoot the same four rooms so the house never feels stale, even though nobody in this family ever leaves it. The set design crew built a home that looks lived in, loved, and eventually a little bit haunted by its own walls. You watch this family invent routines just to stay sane. They play games to pass the time. They watch the same two DVDs on repeat once the internet dies. Ann starts growing vegetables in the living room with whatever seeds she has lying around. It plays like a funhouse mirror of lockdown life, and if you lived through that stretch of years, a good chunk of it will hit close to home. The family is not the only piece of this puzzle either. Across the street, a neighbor is trapped inside his own house too, and the only way he and Jason can talk is through handwritten signs pressed against their windows. That small detail does a lot of work. It reminds you this is not just one family’s private nightmare. It is happening street by street, and nobody anywhere seems to know why. This is also where I’m going to talk about the two lead actors, because that’s where I’m going to fixate. Wagner Moura has a substantial role here. He portrays a guy filled with fears, stubbornness, and a few doses of dad jokes that actually work. He really convinces you that he is a man trying to protect his family despite his gradual loss and grip on reality. Greta Lee cannot count on the same blessing from the script. Her character remains flat throughout the movie, and there is hardly any effort to create a believable backstory of her relationship with her husband or her kids. It is hard for any talented actor to elevate such a character when there is nothing to work on from the text. Now for the part that breaks the whole movie. Past the halfway mark, the family learns the rain is not rain at all. It is creatures from the ocean, and somehow the daughter shares some kind of bond with them. This idea had real promise. A young girl connecting with something from the sea, right after the film opens on shots of ocean pollution and a quote about how this planet should really be called Ocean instead of Earth, sets up a clear message about humans wrecking a world that never belonged only to them. But the script never actually builds that bond. We never see how it starts or why it grows. So when the daughter shows mercy to one of these creatures near the end, that choice does not feel earned. It feels like the writers needed a way out of the proverbial corner they trapped themselves in and expected the audience to fill in the blanks on its own. Then the ending gets worse from there. The creature the daughter spared turns around and protects her whole family from the rest of its own kind. Why would it do that? The movie never says. Then, somehow, every creature in the ocean decides one small act of kindness from a girl they barely know is reason enough to pack up and abandon whatever plan brought them to that street in the first place. None of it lines up with what came before it. If these creatures were furious about pollution and wanted humans gone for good, a single act of mercy should not flip that switch for an entire species. Because the ending collapses, it drags the rest of the movie down along with it. I kept replaying that first hour in my head, trying to pin down what point the film was actually reaching for. Was it about parents raising kids inside a broken world? Was it about humans finally answering for how badly we treat the ocean? Was it simply about a family holding together under pressure? “The Last House” gestures at all three ideas and commits to none of them. A movie is allowed to leave some questions open. That part is fine. But a movie still needs to know what it is trying to say, and this one never quite figures that out. “The Last House” borrows a lot from better films about families held hostage by circumstances beyond their control. Movies like “A Quiet Place” did the hard work of establishing history between the characters before putting the audience on their guard. This one doesn’t bother with that and simply hopes that this seems enough. The similarity with the pandemic is effective for quite a while, and the visuals of a family disintegrating behind a closed door are pretty interesting. Yet, beautiful visuals and interesting premises cannot prevent the film from not providing any details about its own monsters, its own mercy, and its own ending.
OUR RATING – AN UNEXPLAINED 4