Joel on Film

There is something inherently silly about the premise of The Last House, even as the actors deliver their dialogue with an appreciable degree of desperation or sobriety. The idea is quite terrifying: One day, a comfortably suburban family of four finds themselves unable to leave their home. The doors and windows refuse to open, the glass in those windows cracks but does not express outward, and though all latches and locks can be undone, it simply appears that a terrible rain, which starts one day and never stops, has enveloped their house, their street, their city, and beyond all of that to encompass the entire world.

At least, that’s the impression to be gotten by the family and the few neighbors with whom they are able to communicate by words written in a whiteboard. One of the defining attributes of Matthew Robinson’s screenplay, at least for a while, is its ambiguity about practically anything that might be happening outside the house that is the nearly exclusive setting of everything in this plot. Early in the movie, such ambiguity is appreciated, because it sets up a sort of mystery to be solved for the characters and for us: What sort of force could be responsible for a scenario like this one?

Eventually, though, Robinson must provide an answer to that question, and to say that it is an absolute anticlimax would be an understatement. If any movie did not need to build toward a creature of dubious digital achievement, it’s this one, in which the suggestion of an outside threat is far, far scarier than any physical manifestation of it could be. Still, the degree to which that outside threat, once director Louis Leterrier shows it to us, comes across as a cartoonish cop-out only offers a bit of unintentional hilarity.

Until that point, the realization of how silly all this will ultimately become is sort of a slow build. We begin with the family—dad Jason (Wagner Moura), his wife Ann (Greta Lee), their children Graham (Noah Alexander Sosnowski) and Ruth (Riley Chung), and the family dog, who is a very good boy, indeed. They’re all about to head out of the house when Jason realizes that a childish spat between the kids, about who might have broken the front door in such a way that no one can leave, is actually an omen about the horrifying, claustrophobic scenario in which they’re all about to find themselves.

It isn’t just them, either: Neighbors gesticulate the same general problem, and when a woman outside runs for help or the police, she never returns. Inside, the days turn into weeks that become months, and in a particularly jarring moment—because it seems to be transitioning to something else entirely—a time jump brings us years into the future. Food has become scarce, except for what the family is able to catch with a rigged trap, and Christmas becomes a day of exchanging “gifts” that are simply regifted objects from around the house.

Robinson, though, plays pretty loose with the logic of this scenario in ways that eventually undermine both the ensemble of performances here and the hopelessness that pervades the proceedings. Much time is spent on a series of montages detailing Jason’s plans for survival, but then again, there’s a car in the garage that could be used for something it takes these characters quite a long time (literally, as in after that jump) to realize. Following the jump, we find the family in a state that makes very little sense, and then it all arrives at a final fight for freedom.

That carefully curated sense of mystery, then, crumbles upon any elongated scrutiny, which is paired with a turn toward a formulaic, action-movie resolution that seems particularly out of place and wildly over-the-top. The pieces are there in The Last House for something interesting, but it’s telling that Robinson and Leterrier go for something akin to a grotesque sadness once we lay eyes upon an obviously digital creation, when it only resonates as the nail in the coffin of the movie’s creative spark.

Rating: ** (out of ****)