Netflix’s The Last House takes us back to the COVID lockdown days with a thriller that takes the concept to sci-fi extremes when a family finds themselves suddenly locked inside their home by a mysterious force. They’re not alone; the entire street is in the same boat. While director Louis Leterrier (Fast X, Clash of the Titans) mines claustrophobic thrills from the family’s confined plight, this high-concept chamber piece never wades deeper than a puddle in plot or theme.
A famous opening quote from Arthur C. Clarke that precedes the introduction to Jason Delgado (Wagner Moura), fishing off a Seattle pier, is the only hint at what’s in store for the Delgado family for much of the film.
That’s because soon after Jason returns home, we meet his wife Riley (Greta Lee), son Graham (Noah Alexander Sosnowski), and younger daughter Ruth (Riley Chung). Their mundane dynamics are barely set, on an ordinary morning just ahead of Christmas no less, when a seemingly never-ending rainstorm blows through that somehow traps the entire block inside (or out) of their homes with unmovable force.
From here, The Last House quickly settles into a grim routine as hours become days, then weeks. Survival takes priority, leaving the outside threats on the back burner as the Delgados try to maintain their sanity and health in the face of dwindling supplies. Namely food. The script by Matthew Robinson (Good Luck, Have Fun, Don’t Die; Love and Monsters) injects some handy conveniences; Jason happens to be an unemployed engineer, a significant asset in a post-apocalyptic or extreme unnatural setting. Their shambling home also deteriorates just enough to provide strokes of luck when they need it most, giving the family an advantage above the rest of the block. As for hope, well, that’s a constant battle among the foursome over the passage of time.
When The Last House finally begins showing its hand, Robinson and Leterrier dangle a much more interesting film that never fully comes to pass, one that swaps in an alien threat for something much more exciting and underexplored. That yields a few thrilling action sequences and set pieces, especially as the overlong runtime finally paves the way for its final confrontation, but Robinson’s script never really detours far from the Delgados’ bid to survive intact. As such, stakes are dramatically lowered and emotional beats are constantly rushed. Not helping is that Leterrier handles the few bursts of intense sci-fi action with incomprehensible camerawork.
The most glaring issue, though, is that it’s all so happenstance and superficial. It operates on fuzzy logic, hoping that the reliably compelling Moura and Lee can retain audience investment and compensate for a lack of characterization. While both are experienced and talented enough to inject pathos despite paper-thin characters, the children have no real sense of identity whatsoever, outside of empathetic moments from Ruth with the sole purpose of foreshadowing a rather silly conclusion.
The Last House brushes against so many interesting ideas, from climate change to lockdown isolation. It touches on community and family, of course, and, most fascinatingly, injects some Lovecraftian concepts into the mix. All teasing a much more complex and smarter feature. Leterrier and Robinson do nail their primary goal, though; the family is the only real glue holding this clumsy but somewhat serviceable lockdown thriller together.
The Louse House is now streaming on Netflix.
