The Last House (2026)

Rated PG-13 for scary stuff.  Like, the movie doesn't get overly scary.  I get the PG-13 line in the sand.  There are maybe one or two moments that are actually genuinely frightening.  If you are afraid of squid people or things that are kind of Lovecraftian, there might be some terror.  Most of the movie builds more on discomfort than on actual jump scares.  There is some drug use and some language in the movie.  This is more existential dread than anything visibly upsetting.  But there is some death in the movie, so take that into consideration.

DIRECTOR:  Louis Leterrier

So Hand Foot and Mouth is a bear when you are an adult.  See, a lot of the movies that I watch are on the treadmill.  (Aging, apparently, is also a bear.)  But when your feet are covered in sores (you're welcome, readers), it's hard to find time to watch movies like you used to.  So I just shotgunned The Last House, a movie entirely brought to me by gimmicky ad campaign.  Apparently, in Los Angeles, there was a billboard shaped like a house.  Inside of that billboard house, there was  a guy living in it.  Yeah, that was enough to get me to watch this movie.  Congrats, PR department, your gimmick worked.

Now, The Last House falls into a specific subgenre that I tend to like.  I don't want to name this genre, but these are high concept horror movies where the monster isn't easily seen.  (Well, in two of these cases, until the monsters are seen.) There tends to be a promise in these movies of a mystery that should have this great explanation.  In the cases of Bird Box or A Quiet Place, we have to wonder why senses are so key to human survival.  With the case of The Last House, we wonder both what is keeping these people locked in their houses and how they are going to survive with limited resources.  With Bird Box and A Quiet Place, I think these movies give us just enough info about the answer that we don't want to know much more.  It's a real tightrope, these kinds of mysteries.  Like, I still don't really know what makes Bird Box work, but I don't want to know.  I just know that it is spooky pooky.  With A Quiet Place, I kind of know too much and I hope that I don't get any more info.  It's better being ambiguous.  But with The Last House, the answer to the mystery isn't worth the mystery itself.

I can't stress enough: the conceit is pretty cool.  The simple notion of being locked in a house is a cool idea.  Heck, as a Covid allegory, it also works pretty well (although probably not on the same political spectrum as I'd probably like.  Let's just say that I'm a big fan of vaccines and masking).  But there are a bunch of reasons why this movie doesn't work and most of it comes from the third act.  The movie desperately wanted to have an answer for what locked these people in their houses.  This might be one of those few examples where "That's just how the world is now" probably was the better answer.  Having a race of mythical squid people who change the rules every time these people start to adapt is frustrating.  The movie gives us rules at the beginning.  There is no way out.  Cool.  I like that.  When the protagonists find a small (and absolutely absurd) workaround for survival, these creatures start appearing and change degrees of hostility.  I'm not quite sure why there are nice ones hunting them.  Also, the notion that these creatures can just flood a house willy-nilly?  As part of the evolving rules, the inhabitants of the house have to keep the windows closed and they have to stay out of sight during rain.  Fine.  But are the squid people stupid?  They see that there's movement inside the house initially and then just go away?  Why didn't they flood the house then?

Okay, I'm going to come out and say it.  Louis Leterrier might not be an amazing director.  I watched the trailer and thought, "Man, this looks incredibly watchable."  But within minutes of the movie, I realized that this movie had a tone problem.  Like, this movie wanted to be fun.  It really wanted to be fun.  I can see the code behind this movie and how much it wanted to be like other movies tonally.  And I really hate throwing actors under the bus, especially considering that I like these actors, but the chemistry is...rough.  Now, I want to immediately backpedal this comment because I think a lot of it comes down to the edit.  One of the things that we have to believe from the outset is the idea that this is a family full of quirks.  In terms of the dialogue, I could see some of this dialogue reflecting a complex family that fundamentally loves each other, even if they get on each other's nerves from time-to-time.  But we're supposed to fall in love with this family and I never quite get that.  

Everything in the film feels stilted.  The jokes never quite land.  Moments that are meant to be cute don't quite play the way that they're supposed to.  If anything, this movie is a race to the finish line.  Now, I don't know much about the world of streaming algorithms.  This movie desperately wants to be under two hours and I don't quite know why.  I honestly think that a lot of this movie would have been fantastic had it been allowed to breathe.  When we look at a movie that has pacing problems, especially with a choppiness that I see in The Last House, often it is because of the limitations of movie theaters.  See, movie theaters thrive on having a shorter runtime.  The shorter the movie, the more showtimes they can offer.  With Netflix, I don't quite understand.  Maybe the longer cut of the movie was a burden and people just weren't finishing the original cut of the movie.  I'm such a cynic, though, that I feel like the whole movie is kind of a mess and  it isn't in the edit.  

Maybe it's in the mimicry.  I think this is a desperate attempt to pleasing a corporate overlord.  I might be touching on something here because this feels right.  Again, I hate dunking on a movie so hard because it is hard to make a movie.  But this all feel like an attempt to become relevant rather than telling a good story.  I keep coming back to the conceit versus the revelation.  Puzzle box stories are compelling because we want to solve them.  With the case of the rain locking people in their houses, there's something fascinating about nature needing people to be locked inside.  Now, maybe I'm so obsessed with formula that it bothers me when formula isn't followed. (Again, I don't really think that's what is going on here.)  This is a story about nature.  We have gotten story after story (again, I don't think that this is a movie about breaking new ground) about how nature seems horrific, but ultimately is a caretaker of the human race, keeping the moniker of "Mother Nature" intact.  So when we see these people being locked in their houses (ultimately leading to many of them dying), it feels like there's a reason that people are locked up.  

The problem with that, of course, is that we find out that this is simply a weapon used by squid creatures that we were unaware of.  I mean, I can't throw too many stones.  We didn't know about the aliens in A Quiet Place until we did.  Okay.  Fine.  But if the seal in The Last House is meant to be a weapon...it's a pretty stupid weapon.  Sure, it ends up killing people in spades.  But how slowly does that work?  We find out in the third act that these creatures have the power to instantly flood a house, killing everyone inside.  It seems like that should be round one, right?  Instead, there's this need to patrol neighborhoods and search for humans.  Not animals.  Animals are allowed to do whatever.  It's the need to kill all the humans.  Why not, upon seeing any movement within a house, flood the house?  That seems like a really good weapon and one that would have worked had the squid creature not entered the house.  It's just silly.

Also, the car thing is a bad Chekhov's gun.  Like, it's there.  There's a whole room devoted to a garage with a car that is waiting to be put together.  Yes, the car is used to fight the squid monster.  But it didn't have something inherent to the car.  It was a way to pull the monster.  Now, normally, no problem with that argument.  But the thing is, the main character, Jason, invents all of these traps to fish for animals outside the house.  They all have springs and traps and lines to catch them.  So when we have the car catch the squid monster, it really could have been anything.  I see this giant set piece and, sure, he interacts with it at one point.  But the car wasn't being a car.  It was there as set decoration.  That's a bummer.

I wanted to like the message of surviving versus living.  It's a good idea.  But it treats the whole thing as very black-and-white.  Jason's got the internal conflict here.  He's destroying his kids' lives because he's trying to keep them alive.  It's just that...the kids' ideas are bad?  Like, I get that I want to see what's out there as well.  (There's no freaking way that anyone could have predicted that the squids would just call off their invasion of humanity because one of them is mildly cool?  It doesn't make sense.  Are the squids simple?  Like, they can just get over that they exterminated most of the population and then just learned to cohabitate without any kind of dialogue?)  It feels like the finale, once Jason learns to get over his survival instinct, is kind of a suicide run.  Is the goal to kill the one squid creature that got into their house?  They know that there are a billion squid creatures out there.  Do they want to punch their way through it?  It seems like the movie is begging us to forget the rules of the movie just to push through.

Golly, this movie was...disappointing.  It had elements of genius.  But it was so bogged down with action elements that it forgot what it meant to be suspenseful.