Review by Eric Hillis
Directed by: Louis Leterrier
Starring: Wagner Moura, Greta Lee, Riley Chung, Emma Ho, Noah Alexander Sosnowski, Gabriel Barbosa
In Luis Buñuel's 1962 film The Exterminating Angel the guests at a dinner party find that they are inexplicably unable to leave. Buñuel played the scenario for absurdist laughs, but in recent years low budget movies like Coherence, Await Further Instructions, Exit 8, It Ends and We Need to Do Something have taken this premise into the realms of sci-fi and horror. Director Louis Leterrier's The Last House has a bigger budget than its peers, but it's the weakest of the crop of Buñuelian genre pieces.
Just like We Need to Do Something, the inciting incident here is a heavy storm that forces a family to shelter inside their home. And just like the protagonists of that film, they find themselves unable to leave. Parents Jason (Wagner Moura) and Anne (Greta Lee), their eight-year-old daughter Ruth (Riley Chung) and 12-year-old son Graham (Noah Alexander Sosnowski) are baffled to discover that no matter how hard they try to kick down doors or smash windows, their house simply won't let them leave.
Where The Last House departs from the other movies with this setup is in its implication that this is a worldwide occurrence. In Rear Window fashion we see the other residents of the street dealing with the same scenario, communicating with our protagonists via written messages ala Zack Snyder's Dawn of the Dead remake. The internet goes down, along with the cellphone network, though the electricity sticks around long enough to be convenient for the sake of plotting. Ironically, just like 2023's similarly themed Leave the World Behind, this is another Netflix production that reminds us that when the shit hits the fan you won't be able to watch Netflix - here, Jason digs out his old DVD player and turntable (go physical media!).
The Last House eventually morphs into a monster movie, but it takes an age to get to that point. For much of its running time it's a family drama, but this quartet of characters are unconvincing as such a unit. There is an absence of chemistry, with all four performers acting individually rather than as one, and we never get the sense that we're watching people who have already been living on top of one another. Jason and Anne are so underwritten that it's impossible to determine the state of their marriage - there doesn't appear to be any animosity between them, but nor is there any warmth. Lee particularly struggles with her part, playing the role as if she's on Prozac. Jason is defined solely by his job as an engineer, which allows him to come up with clever ways of ensuring his family's survival as the weeks of confinement drag into months, but there's little else to him.
Matthew Robinson's ill-thought out script raises a lot of awkward questions. It's puzzling why none of the characters think to check if any TV channels are still broadcasting, or turn on a radio. If everyone in the world is trapped in whatever building they happened to be in when the storm broke, surely TV and radio stations would stay on the air - what else are they going to do with their time? The elephant in the bathroom is the obvious fact that if the toilet is still working it means water is able to leave the house, so if water can get out so can people. Despite his engineer's brain, this simple concept somehow escapes Jason. Another baffling decision is to have the film narrated by an adult Ruth, only for the movie to later put the child Ruth in a life-threatening situation that we know she will obviously survive.
If your movie consists solely of four people stuck in a single location, they need to be more interesting than the paper-thin family we're lumbered with here. I couldn't help but think about the missed opportunity to centre this narrative on a more interesting inter-personal dynamic, like the staff at an office being stuck in their workplace, or the two parties of a one night stand, an idea The Last House teases with one of its Rear Window subplots (for how that might play out, check out the French horror Else). As the plot drags on interminably for close to two hours and you wait for the penny to drop down the toilet, you'll begin to feel like you're trapped yourself. I can't think of a worse scenario than being stuck at home with nothing to watch but bad Netflix originals like this one.
The Last House is on Netflix from August 7th.
