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The Last House (2026)
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-
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The Secret Agent (2025)
The Secret Agent is a hard movie to fully categorize. It’s set in 1977 Brazil and with its title you might think it’s about some clandestine espionage operation or fighting against a corrupt government, and it does fit those descriptions but not in a traditional Hollywood way. We follow Wagner Moura (Narcos, Civil War) as a former grant-supported energy scientist who comes to clash with a powerful businessman who then hires an assassination team to kill this know-it-all. It’s also about entrenched police corruption and coverups, a found family of people seeking protection and new lives, the search for memory and proof of life, a father wanting to connect with his son in the wake of his mother’s death, and then there’s a running story about a severed leg that goes into the wildest, most unexpected places. It is a leisurely paced movie at almost two hours and forty minutes in length, but each scene is its own luxurious moment to dwell in. Take for instance the opening scene where Moura drives his car to a dusty, rural gas station and finds a dead body covered in newspaper. Nobody wants to come claim the corpse, and then the police do arrive but they take particular interest in Moura, wanting to search his car and ask him questions. Do they know something? Who is this man? A similar early scene involves the police investigating a dead shark where a severed human leg was found inside its mouth, and the way it unfolds and escalates is so naturally fascinating. The Secret Agent juggles many different tones, from nostalgic drama to crime thriller, but every scene is so expertly written and paced by writer/director Kleber Mendoca Filho (Aquarius, Pictures of Ghosts). You may grow weary by its length, but when I was in every scene, I didn’t want it to end because it feels so well-realized in its moment. There’s a subversive switch-out with its climax that reminded me of No Country for Old Men, and the ending coda ties together the flash-forwards and hits hard with the theme of uncovering and honoring the past. This is a lot of movie, much of it I admired more than I outright loved, but it’s such a fascinating balancing act that I would recommend The Secret Agent as a sprawling dive into Brazilian history, culture, and its own political reckoning.
Nate’s Grade: B+
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