Review: The Last House

Director:  Louis Leterrier

Stars:  Greta Lee, Wagner Moura, Emma Ho

Seeing as Spider-man is eating up all of the cinema real estate and that I can’t bring myself to give Eli Roth any of my money for his GenAI assisted slopfest Ice Cream Man, it falls to the slim pickings from streaming services for another weekend’s viewing. Hopefully from next week the tide will turn and options will increase at the movies again. At the very least The Last House on Netflix sells itself well with its charismatic leads; Greta Lee of Past Lives and Wagner Moura of The Secret Agent. You could probably come up with a more attractive pairing but, y’know, not easily.

If this comes from a negative place then forgive me for not being as enthused by Louis Leterrier’s name on the masthead; a journeyman Hollywood filmmaker who is probably best known for that Incredible Hulk movie with Edward Norton or the first in the Now You See Me series. He brings a frantic, messy sense of uncertainty to this ultimately-ludicrous tale of paranormal cataclysm and one family’s strength in the face of improbable adversity. Edited to within an inch of it’s life, removing any sense of breathing space or humanity from proceedings, The Last House reveals itself as something of a late entry in the weary cycle of COVID movies, reflecting grimly on those numberless days of lockdown tedium.

Meet the [name redacted] family, a perfectly well-adjusted foursome living in the Seattle area. In the vaguest of tilts to the energy crisis, we do get a sense that they’re struggling to pay the bills, possibly because they leave all the lights on in the middle of the day. Budding fisherman and father Jason (Moura) returns one day close to Christmas with a storm nipping at his heels. Little do any of the family suspect that the rain isn’t ordinary rain, but rather a miraculous sealant that imprisons everyone on their street (and, presumably, across the world) inside their homes. What about the people who were out at the time, or who left their windows open? Best not to think about them.

The internet’s out, phone service is down. There’s no way to get a sense of what’s going on, so the family hunker down and make the best of things with their exceptionally well stocked larder. But as days turn into weeks and weeks turn into months, supplies and optimism grow scarce. Daughter Ruth (Riley Chung, later Emma Ho) seems preternaturally clued in to what might be going on, but she’s ignored due to her limited years. Jason and his wife Ann (Lee) make the best of things with shared charm, tenacity and an inexplicable amount of on-hand soil, planting vegetable gardens in the living room, fishing out of the chimney (no really) and keeping Ruth and Graham (Noah Alexander Sosnowski, later Gabriel Chung) occupied with home schooling and PE routines. As Ruth’s scattershot narration informs us, “the outside world became strange and dangerous”. But the house is subsiding and the years – yes years – start taking their toll physically and psychologically.

It’s silly if amiable going for the first half with a welcome emphasis on character and performance, but the 5-year time jump that bisects the film also marks the point of sharp decline in what increasingly feels like an ill-thought-out narrative as prone to subsidence as the [redacted] family home. The contrivances that haunt the tonally erratic first half of the film (sometimes cute, sometimes dark-as-fuck) pile ceiling high in it’s second half, which deploys a sort of anything-goes logic once the perpetrators of this global cataclysm come slithering out of the shadows. The Last House morphs into a kind of A Quiet Place wannabe that the intense approach to editing can’t handle. In action sequences, what’s going on is often chaotic, sometimes barely intelligible, while our foursome make bold, baffling and outright stupid swerves of character to force events in the direction that screenwriter Matthew Robinson (of Good Luck, Have Fun, Don’t Die) wants them to go. By the time the movie’s forgotten how fire works, the viewer’s been beaten into submission. Sure. Why not? Do what you like.

It’s hard not to feel as though this is one that M. Night Shyamalan passed on. If there were fulfilling character arcs they’ve been shredded in the effort to get this thing down to a still-overlong 110 minutes, which makes the culmination of this journey all the more unsatisfying. While we’re given a sense of what the hell happened and why, the fate of this family is laughably weak, hinging on a moment of interspecies mercy that’d make James Cameron embarrassed. Having blundered through this mawkish turn – completely at odds with everything else we’ve been shown and told – the aftermath isn’t any brighter than the rest of the film, no matter the tone of winsome optimism ladled over us by the voiceover wrap-up, which clearly (and offensively) tees this up as part one of a more wondrous story to come. No thanks.

Apologies to Matthew Robinson but the writing, particularly in this eleventh hour narration, is terrible. The third act of The Last House feels so hurried and hectic that it collapses virtually all of the goodwill generated by Moura and Lee in their unenviable, try-hard roles. This was no doubt an intriguing premise on the page, but the movie that’s been built has – ironically – no foundations at all. Oh well.