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Most of us aren’t truly ready for films that directly cover the recent horrors of Covid and, well, why would we be? There was a need back in 2021 for something strict and journalistic like Matthew Heineman’s excellent documentary The First Wave and there have been other variously illuminating docs since, but it’s been tough for narrative storytellers to address and confront – and even tougher for audiences to engage. It’s partly why Ari Aster’s intermittently excellent 2020-set satire Eddington fizzled at the box office, released five years after the pandemic began but still five years too soon.
The most effective ways in have usually been through the back door. Mike Leigh’s 2024 drama Hard Truths might have only mentioned the pandemic once and included just one mask but its portrait of a psychologically fractured, permanently on-edge woman, terrified of what lies outside her chillingly sterile house, was very much about the difficult after-effects of the disease. Next week sees the release of The End of Oak Street, an 80s-set fantasy adventure about a family trying to survive a prehistoric invasion from the safety of their own home and this week, sneaked out by Netflix just days before is The Last House, another high-concept genre tale that sees homes across the world locked off from the outside as something terrifying attacks.
We’re focused on just one home, inhabited by a financially struggling Seattle family (although the film is clearly shot in the UK, note the extremely British brickwork), living on an average suburban street. A torrential pre-Christmas downpour brings with it a nasty twist: the rain has somehow forced everyone inside, some sort of mysterious sealant adding magical power to the water. Jason (Wagner Moura, fresh off his recent Oscar nomination) and Riley (Greta Lee) and their two children must figure out the initial, milder concerns – where will the dog shit and without wifi, what DVDs do we have left? – before days turn into months and eventually even longer (something spoiled by an over-eager trailer).
There’s a satisfying and relatable itch being scratched in the lighter moments of early makeshift togetherness, that familiarly cosy process of making do with what we have and, in this case, also forcing a family away from their devices, but grimness is never far away. Elderly neighbours stop appearing at their windows, food becomes harder to eke out and, in a rather shocking chain of events likely to traumatise a certain sensitive subset of viewers, extreme measures are taken when the dog’s medication runs out. Then there’s the matter of what’s outside.
The film works best when sticking to a more grounded survival thriller, mum preserving and reusing food waste while dad’s skills as both engineer and fisherman lead to a nifty sequence of using the oddly un-blocked chimney to hunt (even in the apocalypse, gender roles persist!). As teased by what happens to the family pet, there’s also a willingness to embrace the horrible reality of the situation as resources dwindle and mental health starts to disintegrate (as the son threatens to go full We Need to Talk About Kevin, any conservative notion that the film is suggesting family is all we need is swiftly binned). It’s less successful when it becomes a gloopier sci-fi horror, juicy big questions fumbled with unsatisfying and underwritten answers. There’s something Shyamalan-adjacent about so much of the intriguing set-up but the film gradually switches from skirting the highs of Signs to, almost, reaching the lows of The Happening (what if … nature?) with a sloppy and disappointingly un-twisty last act. Like so many buzzy genre movies, the initial pull of the pitch is left a little dampened by the half-assed follow-through and writer Matthew Robinson’s dialogue is frequently a little too neat and trailer-packaged to rise above cliche (“What do we do?” “We survive” is uttered within mere seconds of “Are monsters real?” “They are now”).
While there’s an above-average sheen to so much of it (Louis Leterrier, the director, is more familiar with studio over streaming fare having made Clash of the Titans, The Incredible Hulk and Now You See Me), for a film that eventually most resembles A Quiet Place, the creature design is immediately unmemorable and entirely unscary while the editing of a theoretically ambitious last set – piece is far too scrappy to push us to the edge. Moura keeps us onboard with some confident leading man command but a rather unconvincing Lee remains unsteady and either goes too small or too big, admittedly left stranded by a script that gives her a character with very little distinction. For two actors more recently associated with weightier material, there are worse paycheque roles to take and, for a platform that often struggles to produce convincing mockbusters, far worse recent examples (it ranks above their recent dodgy Pixar rip-off and even dodgier Crawl rip-off). It does in many ways represent the ideal of a Netflix Friday night movie, not good enough to warrant a bigger screen but, if stuck at home for reasons supernatural or not, just about good enough for a low-stakes click.
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The Last House is now available on Netflix
