It was all so promising… until it was released.
I just watched The Last House on Netflix so you don’t have to.
No, really. You don’t have to.
If you want to, that’s fine. We just don’t think you should.
This thing was a total mess.
Don’t get me wrong, it starts with a somewhat interesting concept. These people are all stuck inside their houses, peacefully and happily celebrating Christmas and making little whimsical notes to their neighbors about what’s going on. It actually reminds you of those very innocent first days of COVID, when everybody was locked inside their houses, people were singing from balconies and making all of those ridiculous dance videos because none of us quite realized yet what we were in for.
And maybe that’s actually the best part of the movie.
Because from that point on, things get progressively worse for the family and, unfortunately, progressively worse for us as viewers.
While the premise is unrealistic, the way these characters faced this moment was TOTALLY unrealistic..
Some spoilers are coming, so read at your own demise.
At some point we’re introduced to the concept that these ill-fated homeowners simply cannot get out of their house. Rain constantly falls outside. Everyone in the neighborhood slowly runs out of food except for this particular family because Dad is apparently MacGyver and knows how to do everything, while Mom suddenly becomes capable of creating a vegetable garden inside the house.
The movie itself seems to be aiming for something much bigger than just a family trapped in a house. There are ideas here about isolation, survival, climate change, humanity’s relationship with nature and even the possibility that human beings aren’t necessarily entitled to this planet forever. That could have made for a fascinating movie.
The problem is that The Last House keeps throwing those ideas at you without ever really bringing them together. What begins as an eerie and almost believable story about a family adapting to an impossible situation eventually becomes so bizarre that instead of wondering what’s going to happen to these people, you start wondering what the hell the movie is doing.
The kids, meanwhile, don’t do much of anything to add to life. When they’re young, they basically say the adults will take care of everything, and that seems to remain their philosophy for most of the movie. It isn’t until near the end that they finally get some gumption and decide to actually do something.
And it’s only when they get that gumption that we finally see some form of oceanic monster. But apparently, according to everybody, these creatures were here longer than we were, so really it’s their planet and not ours.
Okay.
Meanwhile, the monsters are apparently content to allow everybody to slowly decay inside their homes while the land floods with salt water. Inside the house, everything is falling apart, but outside bears and other animals are apparently taking the land back again.
At some point we discover the house is sinking.
But don’t worry! The house can apparently keep surviving for years while Dad fixes his car, everybody ages, the world changes and this increasingly impossible structure just keeps hanging in there.
It’s a total mess.
Are there redeeming parts? Maybe here and there, but you have to sustain almost two hours of mostly dialogue, increasingly unrealistic survival techniques and some pretty amazing creativity from this family, including trapping animals through the chimney with what amounts to an automatic animal trap.
Listen, this movie had the complete tone of a Tubi movie that somehow wandered onto Netflix.
And that’s not necessarily an insult to Tubi.
The ratings on Rotten Tomatoes are deplorable, and after watching it, we can see why.
We wanted to like The Last House. We wanted it to be great. There’s actually a good movie buried somewhere inside this concept. Instead, what we ended up with was something that should have been completely forgettable.
Except it was so bad that we’re probably never going to forget it.
