"The Last House" steals shamelessly - and that's not even its biggest sin
With an undercooked script, undeveloped ideas, a mystery that could have been interesting if anyone involved had given it some thought - plus annoying narration, generic music, and terrible acting. The new Netflix release is simply a bad movie.
The plot and metaphorical idea of survival on a desert island continues to fascinate cinema — just a moment ago Sam Raimi's crazy and cute 'Crawl' passed through here — and now Netflix brings a variation on the theme: 'The Last House'. Instead of an island, we have a family home that one day a mysterious force cuts off from the environment and effectively seals. Its trapped occupants are forced to exist solely on what their limited living space provides, their dwindling supplies, and, as is customary in such stories, their resourcefulness. Will they survive physically? How will they cope mentally? If you have ever read 'The Swiss Family Robinson', then it can be said that 'The Last House' is a horror edition of the classic survival book by Johann David Wyss, and a very, very bad edition.
Jason (Wagner Moura, 'Narcos') is an unemployed engineer and fishing enthusiast. We meet him as a storm approaches his home in Seattle, where he lives with his wife Anne (Greta Lee, 'Past Lives'), their son Graham, their daughter Ruth, and their old dog Cassidy. The family is in a difficult financial situation and the house itself requires repairs, with an emphasis on a cracked chimney that threatens to collapse (a matter that will be essential throughout the 112 minutes). Then the storm breaks, and the family discovers they are locked in. Doors and windows do not open, not even under the application of force, and while electricity and water continue to work, it turns out the situation is the same in all the houses in the area. Everyone is trapped, and when they try to understand why, it turns out that the rainwater itself has turned into a kind of force field.
At this initial stage, 'The Last House' has three significant problems: annoying and unnecessary narration that explains things that need no explanation; generic suspense music that does exactly the same thing; and simply terrible acting by Moura and Lee. As a counterweight, in the first third, enough curiosity is created around the question of what the hell is going on here that the viewing experience is somehow acceptable. But the mentioned problems only worsen later, and as the minutes pass, the whole thing becomes less interesting, sillier, and more recycled. It steals shamelessly from 'War of the Worlds' (Spielberg's wonderful version), 'The Host' (Bong Joon-ho's Korean masterpiece), and 'The Mist' (Frank Darabont's tremendous horror film). 'The Last House' doesn't bring anything new to the table; if anything, it takes off the table. It doesn't provide explanations for the supernatural phenomenon at its center, doesn't do anything smart with what looks like a kind of COVID lockdown on steroids, and doesn't develop the characters or their relationships. This probably explains why the actors do such a bad job — over-acting is often the result of writing that doesn't give them enough to work with.
The screenwriter here is Matthew Robinson, who previously wrote the successful 'The Invention of Lying'; the director is Louis Leterrier, who showed a real spark of action directing in the 'Transporter' films and built a very successful mystery film in 'Now You See Me'. What happened to these two? And while we're at it, what happened to Moura's talent, who usually knows how to come out okay even from disappointing films, and to Lee's, who two years ago carried on her shoulders the little masterpiece that was 'Past Lives'? It's easy to say the answer is Netflix, so that's what I'll say. A bit more seriously, yes, Netflix has a whole inventory of films that look like they were made with eyes closed. But it's not like there's a shortage of crappy films in the non-Netflix world, so it's hard to argue seriously that this is definitely the reason for this multi-system catastrophe. And honestly, what does it matter? A bad movie, that's it.
