Greta Lee, Wagner Moura in Survival Thriller

Flipping the home invasion thriller on its head, Netflix’s The Last House puts a family in peril when a mysterious threat seals them inside their home with no escape while torrential rains pour down — for days that turn into weeks, months and years. Louis Leterrier’s capable direction and reliably solid performances from Greta Lee and Wagner Moura as parents desperate to shield their kids from their worst fears make for a film that, despite its sci-fi and horror elements, is as much a psychological chamber drama and survival thriller about four people using their wits and dwindling resources to stay alive, even as their close-knit ties start fraying. 

Inevitably recalling the isolation of COVID lockdown, the screenplay by Matthew Robinson (Good Luck, Have Fun, Don’t Die) oscillates between finding comfort and terrified vulnerability in self-reliance, keeping the exact nature of the force imprisoning the family — and seemingly everyone else in the world — vague until roughly an hour in, when the suspense is turned up even as the storytelling gets wobbly. 

That wait might frustrate genre fans requiring a more instantaneous stream of high-intensity thrills and scares, or anyone expecting the kind of hard-charging action Leterrier is best known for (the first two Transporter films, Clash of the Titans, Fast X and the forthcoming Fast Forever), but the actors keep it watchable.

The quote from Arthur C. Clarke that opens the film is significant: “How inappropriate to call this planet Earth when it is clearly Ocean.” With global sea levels rising due to climate change, those words could ultimately turn out to be prophetic. The pervasive anxiety attached to such environmental issues contributes to the tensions eating away at the family as they struggle to figure out who or what is holding them captive and what that entity wants from them. 

For much of its running time, The Last House feels almost like a more grounded version of the taut 2023 Kaitlyn Dever sci-fi horror No One Will Save You, this time rooted in human response to an ambiguous, possibly alien threat. Right from Day One, when they are grasping for answers, Jason Delgado (Moura) tells his family that whatever force has left them housebound is not man-made. But like the audience, he is making conclusions based on minimal concrete knowledge.

An unemployed engineer, Jason packs up his fishing gear and heads home from the pier as a major storm front moves in, with no catch to show for his early morning efforts. A voiceover identified only at the end tells us: “The day the rains came, we learned we were not alone.” 

When Jason hustles his loving wife Ann (Lee), their 12-year-old son Graham (Noah Alexander Sosnowski) and 8-year-old daughter Ruth (Riley Chung) out to the car to go buy a Christmas tree, they find the doors and windows of the house sealed shut. Any attempt to force them open or even smash through them proves futile. Looking out their windows, the Delgados discover that their neighbors are in the same position, including a retired couple across the street who have limited food supplies.

At first, Jason and Ann encourage the kids to stick to a routine — household chores, study, piano practice, PE time — convinced the rain will soon stop and their lives will return to normal. With the Wi-Fi out along with TV and radio reception, entertainment options are limited to board games, Jason’s old vinyl collection (a sweet moment has the family cutting a rug to The Cure) and a choice of two films, Annie or Air Force One, to throw into an old DVD player.

They start rationing food, and Ann begins collecting tomato seeds and vegetable roots to start an indoor garden. One of the advantages of a house in disrepair and sinking into its foundations is easy access to soil by lifting a few floorboards. A crack in the chimney spurs Jason to rig a trap with which he goes “fishing,” catching squirrels and other wild animals that wander into the yard and end up in the frying pan. But this food source also brings a new danger into the house.

Somehow, the need to hide from whatever is outside becomes imperative, even more so when they catch their first partial glimpse of a towering creature, unrecognizable as any species known to man. 

Their confinement stretches on, jumping ahead five years, by which time the orderly suburban street has surrendered to overgrown nature. The children grow into teenagers, Graham (Gabriel Barbosa) becoming moodier and more impatient while Ruth (Emma Ho) retreats into her vivid imagination, reading about mermaids and mythological monsters like Krakens and Leviathans. She starts theorizing about undiscovered sea creatures living on the ocean floor. 

Things get hairier once the tentacled entities outside reveal themselves and the family is forced to fight them off. But the creature designs are clunky, dipping for inspiration into H.P. Lovecraft, kaiju, the rampaging river mutation in The Host and a whole mishmash of unmemorable sci-fi freaks. 

The more we see of them and the more their presence is explained, the more the film slips out of Leterrier’s grasp, cheapened by tired jump-scare tropes like corpses bobbing up in water or bodies infested with creepy-crawlies. 

We’ve seen too many more terrifying depictions of families pitted against outsize nonhumanoid aggressors — in the world of A Quiet Place, for one — to be especially transfixed by the faceoffs here, which are less effective than the elemental menace of rising floodwaters threatening to drown the Delgados in their own home. After such a protracted emotional build-up, the conclusion feels rushed, its interspecies-empathy message a bit trite.

The movie’s main strength is its emphasis on familial love as a sustaining force, nodding back to thrillers from the ‘80s. Ann and Jason might both appear to be cracking up under the strain, frightening their children — she becomes more fatalistic, while he is so consumed by his responsibility to keep them safe that he neglects his roles as husband and father — but the unbreakable bond holding them all together makes the stakes more real than Robinson’s script would indicate. 

Lee and Moura are gifted actors, especially compelling as the increasingly haggard Ann and Jason give up trying to mask their despair. And Graham and Ruth are superbly cast at both ages, creating an affecting portrait of family as a lifeline that keeps the audience in their corner even when the storytelling falters.