Creature features used to rule the world, able to pinball throughout our cultural consciousness across the late 2010s with remarkable rampancy. They replaced the coin – and, before that, salt – as one of the principal currencies of horror Hollywood. Bird Box was the water cooler talk of the office for a year. A Quiet Place made a simple premise so marketable that it spawned two sequels and counting. The Shape of Water won Best Picture. But what has burgeoned even further in the wake of the perhaps financially departed monster movies are the isolationist horrors: being stranded 2000 feet in the air in Fall – soon to be getting a wonderfully named sequel, Fall 2 – or landlocked within a vertical culinary prison in streaming hit The Platform.
Netflix spotted a golden opportunity here and asked: what if we combine these creature popcorn adventures with the lonely horrors? What resulted from this fusion was The Last House, a sci-fi thriller about the rain and ocean vying for control after humanity marauded their sacred seas. Their attempt at crossing the beams and uniting two valued genre tropes instead distilled a product that already has dust settling over the play button, appearing on the Netflix homepage like a lost-at-sea script from the streaming giant’s output a decade prior – one that has finally stumbled its way to shore.
The Last House follows the Delgado family (parented by a somewhat overqualified Wagner Moura and Greta Lee) who are caged inside their Seattle home by a torrential rain that has sealed the structure with a regenerating liquid shield, unable to be broken or forced through. It’s a very transparent, COVID-conscious thriller all too obvious beneath the veneer of parroting the industry’s lonely, existentially charged plot archetypes, but one that admittedly can work, if only it had enough internal confidence to send the monsters away.
Being deployed onto streaming’s shores so late after its best possible chance at relevancy gives Louis Leterrier’s Shyamalanian sci-fi a payload of bygone tropes it must avoid to establish any sufferable angle. It spares us the typical trapped Morse code communication in a scene where the rain deliberately, thankfully, disrupts such a possibility. Instead, the locked-down town communicates through whiteboards (and what must be the greatest contact lenses in the state): a much simpler method of dialogue that shows conscience from writer Matthew Robinson (Good Luck, Have Fun, Don’t Die) to dodge the sub-genre’s played-out tripwires.
The Delgados themselves are a fairly utopian cereal box quintet (dog included) who, after initial rapid fear, approach their precipitation pandemic with open arms. The first hour of The Last House is mostly a moving, if never groundbreaking, sentimental vignette into a family whose love and unity will have them outlast their neighbours, assuming the rain barrages them for that long. There’s the younger Ruth, still left to do homework and learn practical skills through her stormy vacation, and older brother Graham, who never acknowledges how bad of a time it is to have a Waterworld poster.
Both are played well by adorable and capable child actors but are outshined by Moura and Lee as a multi-faceted couple navigating both familial bliss and struggled, choice-starved hardship. The family is made to face trials of their strength and survival that leave them both broken, delivering (Moura especially) truly empathetic performances only neutered by the second-screen script Netflix decided to administer (was there any other reason to read aloud the contents of your whiteboards when communicating across the entire street?).
That script can be at times The Last House‘s most water-logged shortcoming. It’s never entirely acknowledged how dumb a movie about Solaris-esque sentient rain that traps people inside can be. Leterrier is known for his ‘dumb fun’ directing on Fast X or The Transporter, but this one attempts at being far more cerebral, seemingly unbeknownst to its own endogenous humour. To top it off, that competent and delightful family story erodes into another generic ‘hide from the scary monsters’ thriller à la those 2010s genre staples, and the rain eventually begins to give up on being interesting to deploy Lovecraftian octopoids into its neighbourhood-wide mist instead. I have to wonder: if the monsters were always part of the picture anyway, what was ever the reason for the brain-meltingly silly conscious rain plot? It wound up being the most literal form of window dressing.
Such charming stupidity will obviously work better for some than for others, but I couldn’t help missing the initial act’s heartwarming family sensibilities and surprising nuclear camaraderie. Wide, gorgeous cinematography from Pål Ulvik Rokseth charts the house as they embrace the amelioration of kindred confinement in ways that cannot be read as anything but a long-overdue response to the 2020 lockdowns, but that breathtaking knack is left behind for blurry, occasionally even nauseating camerawork once the sea beasts flood the interiors, perhaps to obfuscate the smaller budget in comparison to Letterier’s blockbuster work.
As anomalous as it is for straight-to-streaming material, The Last House can look truly great. The house itself is sprawling, practical and considered: carefully-placed cracks dance through the brick not dissimilar to how the communicative rain marionettes across window panes, and each room is lived in. Even the very fleeting exterior cinematography is verdant and beautiful as we onlook an apocalypse that’s got crabs, mudskippers and even bears roaming the streets like they own the place again, as if trying to pre-fire guesstimate the vibe of The End of Oak Street, albeit more acquatic.
The Last House is too parachronistic for its own good. There’s a real, sweet movie nestled in here about learning to pull each other up as the waves of calamity barrage the outside world and try to thrash the Delgados beneath the water. They design traps to ‘fish’ food from outside the chimney, they binge Annie and Air Force One every night together – they even get a comfy The Cure montage! These soaring moments of inspiring unity unfortunately fall victim to the tides of annihilation before the Delgados can, resulting in a flat, boring back-half of fighting tall Kraken-adjacent beasts and, in doing so, burning all of its own energy in one agonising swoop. Ultimately, it leaves nothing more than a splash.
2.5/5.
