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The Last House: Director Louis Leterrier blends science fiction, horror and family drama in Netflix's new thriller, "The Last House."
The film flips the classic home-invasion premise. Instead of intruders breaking in, an unexplained force seals a family inside their own home.
Torrential rain traps them for days. Those days stretch into weeks, then months, then years.
Greta Lee and Wagner Moura star as Ann and Jason Delgado, parents fighting to protect their two children from an unknown threat.
Their performances anchor a story that leans as heavily on psychological tension as it does on genre thrills.
The film plays out like a survival drama, watching four people ration resources and manage fraying relationships while trapped together.
Screenwriter Matthew Robinson, known for "Good Luck, Have Fun, Don't Die," keeps the source of the danger vague for much of the runtime.
The ambiguity echoes the isolation many felt during COVID-19 lockdowns.
Around the one-hour mark, the mystery deepens, though the pacing grows less steady from that point forward.
The story opens with Jason, an unemployed engineer, returning home from a fishing trip as a major storm rolls in.
He arrives just before the family's doors and windows lock shut without warning. Attempts to force them open fail completely.
Looking outside, the Delgados realize their neighbors are trapped too, including an elderly couple with dwindling food supplies.
At first, Jason and Ann try to maintain a normal routine for their children, 12-year-old Graham and 8-year-old Ruth.
Chores, schoolwork and piano practice fill their days. With Wi-Fi, television and radio all down, the family turns to board games, old vinyl records and two DVDs for entertainment.
Ann starts an indoor garden using salvaged soil, while Jason rigs traps to catch small animals for food. That hunting method soon introduces a new threat into the house.
The story then jumps ahead five years. The neighborhood has become overgrown and wild. Graham, now played by Gabriel Barbosa, has grown moody and restless.
Ruth, played by Emma Ho, retreats into stories about sea monsters and mythical creatures, developing her own theories about what lurks outside.
Eventually, tentacled creatures make themselves known, forcing the family into direct confrontation.
Critics have noted the creature design borrows heavily from familiar genre influences without adding much new.
Some jump-scare sequences feel like standard horror tropes rather than fresh material.
Even so, the film's most tense moments come from the rising floodwater itself, not the monsters.
Despite uneven plotting, "The Last House" leans on the strength of its cast.
Lee and Moura convincingly portray a couple unraveling under pressure while still fighting to hold their family together.
Young actors Noah Alexander Sosnowski and Riley Chung, who play the children at younger ages, along with Barbosa and Ho as their teenage counterparts, help sustain the emotional core of the film even when the script stumbles.
Film Details
- Release date: Friday, Aug. 7
- Distributor: Netflix
- Production companies: Chernin Entertainment, 3 Arts Entertainment
- Director: Louis Leterrier
- Screenwriter: Matthew Robinson
- Cast: Greta Lee, Wagner Moura, Riley Chung, Noah Alexander Sosnowski, Emma Ho, Gabriel Barbosa, Arden Cho
- Rating: PG-13
- Runtime: 1 hour, 52 minutes
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