The Last House debuts on Netflix on August 7.
A chamber piece with no consistency, Louis Leterrier’s The Last House plays tonal hopscotch with reckless abandon. Following a family of four who find themselves suddenly trapped indoors, the movie jumps not just between scenes but entire genres, with a head-spinning edit that makes things move at a million miles an hour while, paradoxically, very little actually happens.
Assisted by voiceover befitting children’s folklore, the story opens with Jason Delgado (Wagner Moura) fishing off the coast of Seattle. Rain bears down as the seemingly glum patriarch laments his sparse catch before heading back to his sprawling suburban home. However, any potential drama offered by Jason’s mood (or environmental commentary, by his spoken lines to no one in particular) is quickly brushed aside when he returns to what seems like a happy marriage to Riley (Greta Lee), with whom he has two kids: an elder son, Graham (Noah Alexander Sosnowski), and a younger daughter, Ruth (Riley Chung).
The strange premise rears its head before long as the family suddenly finds that their doors and windows won’t open and their neighbors are in a similar jam. The details are best discovered while watching The Last House — they involve a sudden downpour and mysterious shapes fluttering in the distance — but the film features no sense of buildup or gradual discovery. Perhaps to move things along, the family’s very first assumption is some supernatural occurrence or lurking evil, though this is just one of many instances where they behave more like plot delivery mechanisms than actual human beings.
The days turn into weeks as the Delgados learn more about their conundrum. The movie begins to resemble something born from COVID lockdowns, then adopts the hues of a survivalist thriller before eventually zig-zagging into something else entirely. However, few dramatic beats are allowed to breathe along the way, making this metamorphosis feel especially awkward. Despite its nearly two-hour runtime (which seems endless on occasion), The Last House feels cut within an inch of its life, moving suddenly and jaggedly between conversations and events.
More time goes by than you’d expect, which the evolving production design of the family’s home helps track. However, you might not feel these changes intuitively based on how anyone behaves. Moura and Lee are two of their generation’s finest actors, but The Last House turns them into cheap sideshows who burst with anger and melodrama practically at random. It’s a perfect example of how to build bad performances from presumably serviceable footage; both Jason and Riley go from passive to hysterical at the drop of a hat. It’s grating to watch, even before the movie swings in its umpteenth different direction, widening to include Lovecraftian concepts without the requisite, eerie atmosphere.
There’s some heavy-handed moralizing about humanity’s place in this world, but it ends up taking the form of either clunky narration or ethical dilemmas spun from thin air via flashbacks to scenes shown just minutes prior. Leterrier has never been the most interesting storyteller — The Incredible Hulk and Clash of the Titans are hardly vulgar auteur classics — but his previous works have at least held together as coherent mainstream fare. Whether he’s to blame, or it’s the powers that be at Netflix, The Last House feels cobbled together from disparate footage and ideas, resulting in hastily-changing story modes and emotions you can barely track. The individual images all look right, but when strung together, everything feels wrong.
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