THE LAST HOUSE Review

I need to tell you about the rain. In The Last House, a Netflix thriller that cost considerably more money than it had any right to, the rain is sentient. The rain seals your doors shut. The rain makes your windows unbreakable. The rain, and I cannot stress this enough, knows how to lock your garage door. This is a film in which hostile precipitation has developed a working understanding of residential architecture and has chosen to use that knowledge against us. I watched all one hundred minutes of it. I have questions.

Wagner Moura and Greta Lee play Jason and Ann, a married couple who get trapped inside their Seattle home when the chubby rain arrives, and they are both so much better than this material deserves that watching them grip onto their roles with visible determination becomes its own kind of entertainment. You can feel them finding the human truth in scenes that were written by someone who had other priorities. They are doing heroic work. They deserve a film that meets them halfway.

The Last House is not a film that meets them halfway. The kids are barely characters. The golden retriever has a heart condition that gets introduced with the specific narrative energy of a gun being placed on a mantelpiece. There are monsters on the lawn that growl when it really starts to pour. The family has two DVDs, Annie and Air Force One, which is either a detail of rich specificity or evidence that the script was written very quickly. There is a The Cure themed dance montage that I genuinely enjoyed and that also belongs in a completely different film.

The most interesting character in the whole thing is the house itself, which production designer Kevin Jenkins built from scratch and visibly deteriorates over the course of the film in a way that actually expresses something about the family falling apart inside it. This is a good idea embedded in a film that does not deserve it.

The problem, beyond the sentient rain, beyond the underwritten children, beyond the monsters who apparently need wet weather to operate, is that The Last House cannot decide whether it wants to be a family drama about people unravelling under pressure or a creature feature about magic water. It tries to be both and achieves neither, spreading its pandemic PTSD metaphor so thin across the run time that by the end, it barely registers as a thought.

Netflix slop, occasionally elevated by two actors who simply refused to phone it in. The rain, unfortunately, did not share their commitment.

🍿 SCORE = 45 / 100