Louis Leterrier’s supernatural horror thriller “The Last House” dares to ask an unthinkable question: What would happen if everyone was suddenly stuck in their houses for a really, really long time?
Yup, it sure is hard to imagine anything like that happening in real life. It’s particularly difficult in the mid-2020s, because nothing like that happened to everyone on the planet within the last half decade.
I kid, I kid. But watching the characters in “The Last House” act like being trapped indoors is something they’ve never experienced before is a bigger stretch than the film’s evil magic raindrops (we’ll get to those in a minute). Everyone in Hollywood seems eager to pretend, at least as far as fictional stories are concerned, that the COVID lockdown never happened but this Netflix original wants to have it both ways. It’s a horror movie that plays on our shared, uncomfortable memories of the early days of the pandemic while also pretending the story, with or without its sci-fi elements, is fresh and exciting.
“The Last House” is neither fresh nor exciting. But it’s not bad. Wagner Moura and Greta Lee star as Jason and Riley, a married couple with two kids and a nice, slightly crumbling suburban house. One day it rains and the water mysteriously coats their doors, windows and walls, which somehow makes them completely impenetrable. A quick glance around the neighborhood reveals everyone else is in the same boat. There’s air, there’s water, there’s gas and electricity (for now), but no matter how hard they try, no one can leave.
Jason and Riley put on a brave face for their kids, and by sheer coincidence they have enough food in the house to last a couple months (thanks, artificial preservatives!), but their plan to wait this disaster out leaves them waiting, and waiting, and waiting.
Oh, and there are monsters outside. Did I forget to mention the monsters?
There comes a point, after this family has been trapped indoors for ages, when someone says they only survived because they got lucky. That rings false. It’s like saying Kevin McAllister was only “Home Alone” because of a little whoopsie. No, it took a lot of storytelling contrivances to make that exact situation play out exactly the way it did. Thank god Jason is both an engineer and a fisherman, because those are the exact skills they need to survive. Thank god their chimney is crumbling, because that’s important later. Thank god one of the kids is really into aerial silks, because eventually they’re going to need those. I could go on like this. The movie certainly does.
Eventually, screenwriter Matthew Robinson, who also penned the wonderful post-apocalyptic kaiju-themed teen romance “Love and Monsters,” gets a little bored with the extended metaphor. The final act shifts into a more horror-heavy gear, which makes “The Last House” feel like part of a grander literary tradition.
I won’t say which one, because there’s not a lot you can spoil about a movie like this. The family doesn’t even snipe at each other much. You’d think spending months, or even years in a single location with your parents during puberty would result in a lot more resentment, or at least sarcasm, but apparently this is the emotionally healthiest family in the world, even in a crisis.
This is where old-fashioned star power comes in handy. Wagner Moura and Greta Lee are bewitching performers who inject their straightforward material with desperately-needed immediacy and sensitivity. They’re not too good for this material. Well, arguably they are, but they don’t act like it. They make “The Last House” feel as real as a contrived allegory probably could.
Meanwhile, director Leterrier keeps the experience humming along, undeterred by the limitations of his production. (In many ways, “The Last House” plays like a charming throwback to the early era of Blumhouse, when every hit horror thriller took place entirely in an inexpensive suburban home.) Leterrier is a confident and energetic blockbuster filmmaker taking an unexpected side road into M. Night Shyamalan territory, but his visual clarity and his sixth sense for pacing make a big difference in a movie which, by nature of its premise, could easily have wound up in the doldrums.
“The Last House” has foundational problems, but also foundational joys. That the premise feels forced — and goes off the rails in the finale — is a drawback. Then again, it’s skillfully presented and exceptionally well cast, which makes up for most of the obvious deficiencies.
It’s a good film to watch while you’re stuck in the house, not because you can’t leave but because you just don’t feel like it. If you couldn’t leave it would get real old, real fast, because the last thing you’d want is to be reminded of how stressful, yet somehow simultaneously boring, it would be to live out this movie for real. Again.
