What begins as a clear allegory for COVID lockdown with a supernatural, Twilight Zone twist unravels quickly to be a muddled, confused, and disappointing monster movie that feels far too busy and silly for a movie this self-serious. The Last House starts off promisingly with a mysterious rain that essentially traps everyone in their homes, acting like a superglue force field. From there it becomes a question over if you were trapped in your home, what could you do to survive? At first it’s just general boredom with a family of four, and the parents (Wagner Moura, Greta Lee) trying to maintain their sanity. As weeks pass, it becomes a more pressing question over resources and food. I was expecting the movie to get creative with solving its in-universe dilemmas, but some of those solutions feel rather arbitrary and cheap. Why is there still electricity? If the rain is presented as creating a barrier, why is a hole in the chimney somehow able to circumvent this rule? There’s a whole lot of animal death in the movie, including mercy-killing the family dog and literally using its chopped carcass to lure small woodland creatures into a improvised fishing trap. It would be more disturbing if it wasn’t so ridiculous. I’ll credit the script for a major time jump because it renewed my flagging interest, trying to analyze what growing up in this extreme setting could do to a new generation who have only really known a strange world of isolation. I suppose that wasn’t interesting enough to Netflix because the last 40 minutes of the movie are about fighting Lovecraftian monsters that are, I guess, controlling the rains and just messing with people. Much like the characters onscreen, the movie is trying to do as much with what little resources it has left. The movie combusts at an alarming rate once it becomes an incomprehensible monster movie, and incomprehensible about even following the quick-cut action onscreen, which is obscured by the editing but also a majority of the scenes being underwater. The actors are wasted, the ideas are wasted, and The Last House doesn’t even give us the benefit of a true ending, instead previewing what a Last House(s) franchise could like like. I’d rather stay inside and eat the remains of my dog.

Nate’s Grade: C-