Directed by Louis Leterrier (The Incredible Hulk; Grimsby; Fast X) — Screenplay by Matthew Robinson.
Louis Leterrier’s The Last House is a sci-fi survival thriller-adjacent film about a family of four — parents Ann (played by Greta Lee) and Jason (played by Wagner Moura) and children Ruth (played by Riley Chung, Emma Ho, and Arden Cho) and Graham (played by Noah Alexander Sosnowski and Gabriel Barbosa) — as they experience a seemingly worldwide supernatural occurrence in which barriers of water form around houses thus blocking anyone from getting out of their homes and making it impossible for any person stuck outside to get in. You can drill holes in the door and try to smash your windows, but then the characters in the world would see water form up and block the holes and prevent the windows from shattering and falling apart. Although the electricity works (for now) and they have air coming in and access to running water, they only have a limited amount of food and medicine, and they have no way of contacting the outer world other than to hold up signs for neighbors to see. Meanwhile, rain often falls outside their windows, and soon they start getting the idea that some creature, or creatures, may be outside and that they may be a serious threat to their lives.
When I saw the trailer for the film, I was immediately hooked. There’s an art to making a good trailer, and this one really sold me on the basic ideas of the premise, as well as the sci-fi thriller aspects of the plot that it would eventually move into. However, when I saw the film the other day, I was quite disappointed by the fact that even though it technically is the film the trailer indicates, the mood of the trailer — and certain shots toward the end of it — sort of sells the film as more of a sci-fi survival thriller than it really is. The film’s actual sense of pacing and also portioning of the genre elements doesn’t quite live up to what the trailer gave off. The sci-fi predicament in The Last House is very clearly — and this was also clear from the trailer — an allegory for the COVID-19 lockdown that we all went through. It’s quite obvious from its ‘stuck in place,’ ‘but you have to try to go on living’ aspect of the first act. In the first thirty minutes, we’re, at one point, served a montage of weirdly quirky family lockdown dramedy vibes, and you get this idea that the characters aren’t treating the horrific and very science-fiction-esque predicament that they’re in with the seriousness or gravity that it merits. Frankly, I think the film is often stuck — and gets stuck again later — in this mode where the claustrophobic paranoia doesn’t fully set in.
Every once in a while you do get these almost whiplash-inducing tonal switcheroos, like someone showing up outside their window, a neighbor communicating how much trouble they’re in, or emotional manipulation of events concerning the family dog. When, eventually, we get to the more creature feature genre elements, it is so late in the film — and after a colossal time jump — that the film has to rush things like setting up a character needing medicine, getting that medicine, and letting it do its job that it feels like the film is trying to wrap things up speedily in a climax that is quite anticlimactic. You’re left with more questions than answers at the end of the film. It’s the kind of film that falls apart the more you think it over. Like, wouldn’t medicine in someone’s house be past its expiration date several years after the start of this lockdown-esque event? I could go on, but I don’t want to go deeper into spoiler territory than I already am.
I will say that the film often looks quite competently made, and, of course, with Greta Lee and Wagner Moura, it has two very popular actors to shoulder the weight of the premise. However, none of the actors come out clean here. I think they try, but there’s very little to latch onto for them. Of all the actors here, I think Moura comes out of the film looking the best, but his character (a fisherman and an engineer) is incredibly thinly drawn. Also, the film fails to properly set up the ‘absent-minded father’ theme that they try to force into the second half of the film in a way that could feel even a little bit honest to the rest of the film, in which he seems like a very good parent. It feels put on rather than natural. I like both Moura and Lee, but they’re both quite unsuccessful here, and Lee especially so. There’s even less to her character, and the time jumps make certain scenes look overacted.
Frankly, I do think there was a film here, on the page, that grasped some larger ideas. Notably, the film opens and closes with Wagner Moura’s character choosing to do something for an inhuman species that is definitely meant to emphasize the larger point that the film tries to land on (and that the unnecessary voice-over tries to hit you over the head with). There’s also an important line around the halfway point in which one character says something along the lines of “aren’t we growing enough stuff to stop using the traps?” thus trying to emphasize the environmentalist theme that humans are unnecessarily greedy in their ransacking and exploiting of the planet’s wildlife. If the rest of the film had worked better, perhaps this could’ve felt more elegantly included than it ultimately does.
At the end of the day, Louis Leterrier’s The Last House is not as good as its trailer was. It is tonally uneven and unevenly paced. While I did enjoy the Lovecraftian creature design that we’re eventually treated to, the genre elements ought to have been better portioned out throughout the film, because when the film finally does something interesting, there’s not a lot of time left in the film. Also, the competent actors are let down by thinly drawn characters and a family dynamic that doesn’t feel natural or real. As such, this film fails to live up to its potential and is a fairly big disappointment to me.
4 out of 10
– Review written by Jeffrey Rex Bertelsen.
