There’s a subsection of horror/sci-fi that’s been bubbling for a while that one could argue comes directly from our experiences with COVID – though more often than not, the filmmakers attribute it to different inspirations, likely because nobody likes to think about the pandemic which is, guess what, still around because we generally failed as a society in eradicating it. Oopsie! That subsection, though, is the “trapped in your house” thriller, which finds a family (or others) inside a house and beset by something absolutely awful outside. The latest? The Last House on Netflix, which actually rather effectively one-to-ones this COVID metaphor neatly through most of the running time, up until it starts explaining things in the final act and completely falls apart in spectacular fashion.
The plot follows Jason (Wagner Moura), an unemployed engineer and fishing aficionado who finds himself trapped inside his house by torrential rain, alongside his wife Ann (Greta Lee), daughter Ruth (Riley Chung), and son Graham (Noah Alexander Sosnowski). And it’s not just a strong rainstorm that keeps them trapped inside… It’s literally the rain holding them in there – later Jason muses about whether it’s just a big box around the house – locking the doors, and sealing up any holes they attempt to make in order to escape.
It’s also not just their family who is trapped, it’s the neighbors on their cul-de-sac as well. And thanks to the internet and phones going down (curiously, electricity, gas, etc. continue), they don’t know whether it’s the whole world, but are able to discover it goes at least five blocks. Meanwhile, there’s something lurking outside that has seemingly killed everyone who wasn’t inside when the rains began, and is spooking the increasingly bold wild animals.
Writer Matthew Robinson and director Louis Letterier do a bang-up job in the early going of playing the COVID beats. There’s the sci-fi/fantasy premise at play of course, but trapped in the house Jason and Ann keep the kids to a routine, trying to make things fun, often in stir-crazy ways (Jason teaches them how to gut fish by using stuffed animals). And though there’s no sourdough starter present, Ann does start growing vegetables inside the house thanks to leftover seeds. They watch Annie every night (hearing them sing “gotta hang on ‘til tomorrow” is about as subtle as the movie gets) and try to appreciate moments like the clear skies outside and getting to spend time with each other… While slowly losing their minds. In that, The Last House works like a modern Twilight Zone episode, and could have followed its COVID metaphor to a dark conclusion by the end of an hour.
The Last House, though, is nearly two hours long. And if you catch the Arthur C. Clarke quote at the top of the movie – “How inappropriate to call this planet Earth when it is clearly Ocean.” – you have a clear idea of where the film is going in that second half once it starts laying out the answers for why they’re trapped in the house, and who put them there. It’s unfortunate, too, because Letterier effectively makes the one-house set work for the running time previously, finding new angles and ways of shooting without making it feel repetitive. And given we all went through COVID, seeing the characters communicate with their neighbors through signs when they can’t interact, watching older people in the neighborhood die… It all efficiently brings back that awful feeling from a few years ago with a sci-fi sheen.
But no, it’s – spoiler past this point – sea monsters, something I don’t really remember happening back in 2020. Not only are the monsters themselves poorly designed in the worst of CGI beasties, but the script becomes more didactic and dumb as the family turns into action heroes with multiple sequences seemingly buoyed up by retroactive narrative lines and leaden dialogue like “The water is rising too fast! We have to get to the attic!” Which, granted, made me laugh out loud at the sheer absurdity but was definitely not the intention. And worst of all, Letterier, who made his bones on action movies, films the action incomprehensibly in a final sequence that leads to a concluding note, including an extended flashback attempting to lay out justification for a series of character choices that do not, under any circumstances, hold up to scrutiny.
Adding extra frustration here is that Moura and Lee are superb actors who bring a lot of texture to their otherwise one-note characters. The most interesting choice the movie makes is that Jason is kind of a jerk, and Moura brings a low level of insolent petulance to Jason which plays against the “family together” scenes… There’s a bit of the old “I’m not locked in here with you, you’re locked in here with me” going on, and perhaps another movie would have played in that The Shining style direction. Instead, any interesting ideas – COVID metaphors, how isolation can plague on your psyche – get subsumed by vague hand-waving at environmental ideas, mythology, and “what if instead of not together… Together?” a favorite theme of movies these days that really should be more fleshed out than the “hang in there, kitty” poster it usually plays as.
The kids do a solid job too, though you can chart the sheer drop-off of the movie once they get switched out for older actors after a five-year-later time jump. Shouts to the casting department for finding teens who look like the younger kids, but there’s a dissonance in emotionally connecting with new actors halfway through the movie, when we’ve already formed an attachment with the younger ones, that’s unfair to the newer actors (they’re played by Emma Ho and Gabriel Barbosa). It also obliterates the vintage Spielberg/Amblin vibe the movie is clearly aiming for… Perhaps they didn’t think people wanted to see an eight-year-old and a 12-year-old in physical danger, or thought the Avengers: Endgame time-jump would be a jaw-dropper. It’s not, and frankly would have been a tighter movie if it stuck to the several months timeline that’s already grating on the family.
The inherent problem may be that we still don’t have enough distance from COVID to properly process what happened, and what is still happening. It’s laudable to try, but The Last House only represents the situation instead of finding some sort of catharsis… Unless I missed all the sea monsters while I was clanging pans for our heroic healthcare workers.
The Last House is on Netflix now.
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