The Last House Goes In The Last Direction You Would Expect

Jason (Wagner Moura) and Riley (Greta Lee), and their two kids Graham (Noah Alexander Sosnowski) and Ruth (Riley Chung), are a regular suburban family. They live in a quiet little enclave surrounded by neighbors they barely speak to, while Jason fishes at the nearby dock and builds his dream car in his spare time. But that mundane existence is suddenly interrupted by the onset of a heavy rainstorm that mysteriously never stops. And when the family set off to buy a Christmas tree together, they find themselves locked into their house. Nothing they try — breaking the windows, hammering through walls, prying the garage door — works. But they’re not the only ones trapped inside: they can see their neighbors across the street are also stuck in their houses, as is — they soon learn — the whole world.

Thus begins the intriguing premise for The Last House, Louis Leterrier’s twisty new sci-fi thriller that begins as a Stephen King-inspired supernatural psychodrama and ends far, far left of that. But while the truly unpredictable turns from Matthew Robinson’s ambitious script are to be admired, and Moura and Lee try their best to elevate this made-for-Netflix thriller, The Last House’s many twists induce more whiplash than wonder.

Much of the first act of The Last House plays out like a strangely cozy survival thriller written by someone stuck in their house during lockdown. There’s a feeling of togetherness that clashes against the King-like eeriness of the endless rain that has them trapped inside. It’s like if someone said “what if everyone kind of got along in The Mist?” and traded in the paranoia and unpleasantness for camaraderie and family singalongs. It’s a strangely adversity-free first half of the film, which is also jarringly edited and bizarrely paced — Leterrior abruptly cuts from one scene to the next, with no space for characters to show any internality or to really process this strange situation they’ve found themselves in. Instead, Jason and Riley have a few quick back-and-forths to tell us how scared they are, before jumping into survival mode: they quickly institute a schedule and chores for themselves and their kids, start to hoard water, and prepare for their electricity to inevitably go out. Riley starts a garden from tomato seeds, while Jason — after the family discovers that an old crack in their chimney has created a tiny hole in the strange shield around their house — breaks out his engineering skills to create traps for wildlife that wander into their backyard.

There’s a certain degree of competency glazing to this first half ( look how good this family are at surviving!) but no sense of real conflict even as the family flirts with starvation. There’s some looming dread of the family dog who quickly falls ill, but Leterrier and Robinson seem to be scared of treading into any potential ickiness. The movie cuts away from any real pain or trauma, instead rapidly moving on to the next thing; there’s no sense of who anyone in this family really is except for what they contribute to their continued survival. Moura and Lee are punching way above the weight class of this movie, with Moura in particular trying to inject a haunted ferocity into a man desperate to protect his family, but Robinson’s labored script undercuts all of that.

There’s another movie made by a Transporter-era Leterrier that leans into the nastiness of the situation and delivers the kind of schlocky B-movie that he’s obviously itching to make. We see glimpses of that when the second half of the film fast forwards five years and the movie finally inches towards the eldritch horror that it promises in young Ruth’s ominous descriptions of the “person in the rain.” The film suddenly transforms into a monster movie, populated by Cthulu-like sea creatures that emerge from the rain and attack the house. It would be cool if it weren’t so out of the blue, and tonally out of sorts with the first half of the movie, which again, had the family singing along to Bowie and having movie nights with Air Force One. It feels like The Last House wants to have their cake and eat it too, by delivering an endearing family movie that also doubles as a Stephen King paranoid thriller, that also doubles as a Lovecraftian B-movie.

In other words, it’s a movie made by algorithm, designed to be chosen for family movie night by a group of people with disparate tastes and only half a mind of watching without looking at their phones. So while there’s something to the twisty unpredictability of the film, and how it hopscotches between genres and tones, The Last House feels like a low-effort thriller from the house of Netflix.

The Last House is streaming now on Netflix.