REVIEW: “The Last House”
Courtesy of Netflix
The Last House is the kind of movie that gives streaming originals a bad name. It takes a genuinely intriguing premise, one packed with potential for a tense, claustrophobic survival thriller, and turns it into a tedious, frustrating watch. There’s a good movie buried somewhere inside The Last House, but it’s even more trapped than the family at its center.
The movie focuses on the Delgados: unemployed engineer Jason (Wagner Moura), his wife Ann (Greta Lee), and their preteen kids, Graham (Noah Alexander Sosnowski) and Ruth (Riley Chung). They live in a quaint Seattle suburb and are gearing up for the holidays when a torrential rainstorm rolls in. Soon after, they discover that every door and window in their house won’t open. More alarmingly, it seems their neighbors are sealed inside their homes too. Before long, communication with the outside world cuts off, and there are signs that something monstrous, or possibly otherworldly, is lurking outside.
From there, the movie becomes a waiting game: can the family hold together long enough to survive? At first, they make the best of it by watching movies, cooking, playing board games, and reconnecting in analog ways. But days turn into weeks, weeks into months, and months stretch into years. Resources dwindle, the kids grow up, and family bonding gives way to panic and desperation. Another upsetting development worth warning viewers about is that, as the years pass and rations also grow scarce, the family’s pets become part of the survival equation. No need to go into details; just consider yourself warned.
For its first two-thirds, the movie plays like a slow-burn chamber piece that moves at a glacial pace with little escalation. A family watching years slip away while trapped inside four walls should be terrifying, but the script settles into a loop: the family argues, something strange happens outside, the kids panic, the parents shout, repeat. Time itself should be the scariest villain here, yet the movie tells us years are passing without making us feel the weight of them. One element that does pull off conveying the passage of time is Kevin Jenkins’ production design, which is easily the highlight of the movie. The house ages alongside the Delgados: walls crack, floorboards are torn up, rooms are repurposed, and a cozy suburban home slowly becomes a battered bunker. There’s more storytelling in the house’s physical decay than in most of the script.
Unfortunately, the family inside the house is far less convincing. At no point do the Delgados feel like an actual family. They seem more like four strangers thrown together. That problem worsens when the child actors are swapped for teens halfway through. Graham and Ruth become aggressively annoying, and their rebellion makes less sense given the threat right outside their front door. Jason and Ann don’t fare much better; they talk about unity while constantly working against each other, and Moura and Lee never generate the chemistry needed to sell years of marriage and family life. Moura, one of the best actors working today, at least finds flashes of nuance in Jason, occasionally locating real desperation. Lee, on the other hand, feels badly miscast as Ann, and her performance exposes the limits of her range. Both actors spend too much of the movie shrieking and hyperventilating, making their performances more grating than gripping.
The screenplay doesn’t do them any favors. Matthew Robinson saddles the movie with heavy-handed narration designed to underline its big themes of climate change, humanity’s relationship with nature, and isolation. It’s also an unmistakably COVID-coded movie about people suddenly trapped inside their homes and forced to adapt to a frighteningly new normal. Any one of these things could have carried a movie, but The Last House barely explores them. Things fall apart even further once monstrous sea creatures emerge from the endless rain. They’re meant to be mysterious, terrifying, and even sympathetic depending on the scene, but the more we see of them, the less interesting they become.
All of this leads to the movie’s biggest problem: it can’t decide what it wants to be. Horror movie? Survival thriller? Supernatural mystery? Environmental parable? Apparently, the answer is all of the above. After spending most of its runtime as a meditative chamber piece, it abruptly shifts into preposterous action, with the Delgados fending off sea monsters as the movie races toward a rushed conclusion. The tonal whiplash exposes director Louis Leterrier’s limitations on both sides. Known for action movies like The Transporter, The Incredible Hulk, and Fast X, he seems oddly uncomfortable with the smaller, character-driven material. His direction is flat, never building the sustained tension needed to make the confinement unsettling. Yet when the movie shifts into what should be his wheelhouse, the action is surprisingly incoherent, as if the film is trying to compensate for an hour of inactivity by throwing everything at the screen at once.
As the action devolves, the internal logic collapses. Audiences will accept wild premises if a movie sets clear rules and follows them. The Last House rewrites its rules whenever the plot gets stuck. The more you think about how the house is sealed off, how the creatures function, or why certain events happen, the less any of it holds up, which is fatal for a movie built around a mystery. Most frustrating is the ending. After nearly two hours of raising questions, the movie never provides answers or real closure. Instead, it leaves the door cracked open for a sequel, an impressively bold and optimistic choice for a movie this bad.
Ultimately, The Last House has the premise and occasional visuals needed for a gripping survival thriller. What it lacks is the cast chemistry, well-written characters, and coherent storytelling to make any of it work. The Delgados spend years searching for an exit from their home, but most viewers will probably start looking for theirs long before the credits roll.
The Last House is currently available to stream on Netflix.