“The Last House,” Netflix’s latest sure-to-be-#1-for-a-week-and-then-forgotten-forever horror movie, has such an intriguing what-if premise that its failures become significantly more disheartening. It’s a movie that worked on paper, but its creators were so content to mimic superior films with similar concepts in production instead of developing their own that the whole thing ended up too shallow and thin to care about anything that happens. With too little character development and nothing to say about its high concept, “The Last House” is frustrating and forgettable.
Again, the concept is instantly engaging (which is half the battle in the overcrowded world of streaming originals): What if you physically couldn’t leave your house? The COVID lockdown allegory is strong as parents named Riley (Greta Lee) and Jason (Wagner Moura) discover one day that none of the doors in their home will open. The same holds true for the windows and every other way that Jason tries to blast his way out of the abode. Shattered glass simply reforms, almost as if the moisture from the storm has created a barrier around the home that Riley and Jason share with their two kids (Riley Chung & Noah Alexander Sosnowski). They can see through their window that they’re not alone in this predicament. It’s not just the empty suburbs but the neighbor across the street with whom Jason communicates with signs that make this clear. Everyone may be stuck indoors, but there’s something out there in the abandoned yards, something that looks like it might not be quite human.
To be fair, writer Matthew Robinson and director Louis Leterrier (“Fast X”) do answer some of the tough questions, like where the dog is going to do its business and even how the family will look at their beloved pet as supplies dwindle. Naturally, that becomes the primary concern for Riley, Jason, and their kids: What happens when we run out of food? They start by rationing what they happened to have in the house that day, but montages eventually reveal that they’re able to grow some sustenance of their own to stay alive. The script understandably elides several practical concerns like lack of medication and toilet paper, but it’s also an ironic defense of physical media as the family is forced to watch the only two DVDs they own on repeat. Netflix won’t work during the apocalypse, people. But your Criterion Blu-rays still will.
“The Last House” never develops the right degree of claustrophobia in its midsection, which should be a taut study in how being trapped with people, even those you love, can drive you slowly insane. It just never feels like the stakes are high enough in what needed to be the psychological horror section of the piece—it’s clear that the script is merely treading water until it can get to the action stakes of the final act.
This leads to a depressingly boring movie, especially given the talent of its two leads. Moura makes out best as “The Secret Agent” Oscar nominee finds an immediacy that the rest of the film lacks, but Lee is miscast, and, crucially, it just never quite feels like this is an actual family. There’s absolutely no sense of a shared history, as if Leterrier and company didn’t have the time or interest to do the back story work to make that happen. For this movie to connect, we need to truly believe that the only four characters we’ll really spend time with are not only stuck together but bring the baggage of their lives to that point into this predicament—it’s something that this film’s obvious influence, “A Quiet Place,” did significantly better. In this case, it’s all a what-if experiment instead of a film with three-dimensional, believable characters. Think of the concept, close your eyes, and you can probably picture a better movie.
Ultimately, “The Last House” is one of many obvious COVID lockdown allegories of late in the horror genre that doesn’t really have anything to say about those historic days, or even a vision of an unimaginable horror divorced from its obvious inspiration. If you’re not gonna provide the thrills, at least give viewers something thematically engaging to chew on. “The Last House” does neither. Condemn this one.
