It’s only been a short period of time since The Last House dropped on Netflix, and I’ve already seen some really wild reactions to the film. The latest in Netflix’s continued onslaught of skipping theatrical brings recent Academy Award nominee Wagner Moura and Greta Lee to a pandemic-era-style film where it’s a limited location, trapped inside a house with seemingly no end in sight. The director bringing this masterpiece to life is Louis Leterrier, the man behind The Transporter, The Incredible Hulk, and Now You See Me, and unfortunately, most recently, Fast X, which was not a great film and has stalled the development of the final film in the Fast & Furious franchise, which he, oddly enough, is still tapped to direct. This film was born out of a screenwriter trying to work through his pandemic-era issues. Themes about loneliness, the feeling that stay-at-home orders completely turned life upside down for many, and the hopelessness of having no idea when things might return to normal are all baked into the concept. It would be a winning concept if the screenplay were better, but unfortunately, the screenplay is not.

I’ve seen quite a few reactions to this film that give it a huge pass on its nonsensical madness because they either see it as a tight, claustrophobic thriller or somehow better than whatever else they’ve seen on Netflix recently. Whatever the excuse is, even I had to make an exception after seeing the film because I have a friend who is obsessed with science fiction movies. I messaged them, letting them know this movie was out and that I thought it was up their alley. When they asked me what my Mac the Movie Guy opinion was, my response was: interesting nonsense. I keep seeing people giving this movie a pass because they were able to check their brain at the door. There’s a difference between making a few leaps and allowing for a few conveniences, but this film, I think, requires a full lobotomy. It’s one of the most baffling films I’ve seen in quite a while in terms of what it’s asking the audience to actually accept.

The film centers around a family of four, with mom played by Greta Lee and dad played by Wagner Moura, along with their two kids, Graham and Ruth. At the very beginning, we get a little bit of a leading reveal that pulls from the old idea that it’s strange we call our planet Earth when it’s predominantly covered in ocean, suggesting perhaps we should have named it Ocean instead. It’s a reminder that we still have yet to plunge the deepest depths of the ocean, which will become really important. I would also say it’s highly likely that the screenwriter here was trapped inside his house during COVID and his DVD collection consisted only of The Happening and possibly one other film. He even brings that thread into the film when it’s revealed that, for some reason, this family has only two physical DVDs in their entire collection: Annie and Air Force One. That’s such a weird collection to have. They both start with the letter A, and those are the only two films they have. I can understand people giving away DVDs and having fewer of them to choose from, but even if you started with a massive collection and reduced it down, you’d probably still have more than two, and I don’t know whose collection would be reduced to Annie and Air Force One. It reminded me a little bit, as the entire film does, of Leave the World Behind, that Netflix end-of-the-world movie with Ethan Hawke, Julia Roberts, and Mahershala Ali, where a DVD collection was certainly at the heart of part of that movie as well.

Here, our family wakes up one morning and finds out that their front door doesn’t open. No door opens, and they can’t get out. There’s something keeping them in, preventing them from going outside. They can look out the windows and see their neighbors, and it’s handy that everybody apparently has the kind of chalkboards or whiteboards they can write on to easily communicate with their neighbors since phones don’t exist. That way, neighbors can keep track of each other even though they can’t verbally communicate, which means all of the other actors in this film are basically day players because they don’t offer much to the story. Our family also has a dog. If you want to know the fate of the dog, I’ll answer that question by suggesting that you probably have a problem with the death of animals in general, which would make this film a problem for you regardless of the fate of the dog, as trapping and hunting become elements later in the film.

Much like during the pandemic, this family just calmly waits for everything to pass. That bothered me because they really accept quite well that there’s some invisible force keeping them from even opening the door and going outside. This is a little bit more than a pandemic because it’s not like they can step outside and walk around their property. In The Woman in the Yard, Danielle Deadwyler and her family could at least exit the house and go outside. They couldn’t really go far, but they could go outside. There have been other films that have done this isolationist thing while still allowing their characters to leave the house. Here, whatever this family has inside the house at the time is what they’re going to be living with until this mysterious thing passes. Wagner Moura’s character even admits it might be aliens, going straight to that conclusion because, honestly, why else would there be an invisible force field around your house? While mom and dad try to keep things calm for the kids, they maintain daily routines, making the kids continue their studies while finding small projects of their own. Eventually, the passage of time becomes greater and greater, and the third act gets kind of crazy. Ruth starts noticing that during the daily rain, which comes almost like clockwork, there’s something outside. As the film progresses, it becomes a little more obvious what that thing is, and by the third act, it’s all about what’s outside.

So why didn’t I like this movie? Well, it doesn’t really work on any level. Even if you’re thinking about this as a claustrophobic pandemic movie, there are other ones that work better. There have been films where people are trapped in limited locations that still manage to make sense and be engaging. I don’t really have a problem with any of the actors except Greta Lee, who I think is miscast here. She doesn’t really seem engaged by the film at all or seem to want to be in it. She feels disconnected from the situation at hand. She doesn’t feel like anybody’s mother, and she doesn’t seem particularly scared or worried except perhaps in one scene. But the bigger problem is that there are a host of silly, nonsensical conveniences I simply cannot overlook. Things that don’t make sense, choices no human being would make, and things the movie never adequately explains.

For example, Wagner Moura’s character decides he’s going to repair the car in the garage that isn’t working. Just in case, because you never know, one day they might be able to drive out of there. Highly unlikely, but it gives him something to do. So he fixes the car in the garage that’s attached to the house and immediately turns it on and starts running it. This is a gas guzzler, not an electric vehicle. So he has a car running and producing carbon monoxide in a house that is shielded by a force field. I’m not 100% sure that was the best idea he had. And he starts that car twice in this confined space during the film. He also, because the film allows him to mention that he used to own a boat but sold it because kids are expensive, for some reason still owns a harpoon gun. I’m not really sure why, other than the fact that the film requires him to have a harpoon gun at some point. Basically, their house is the Room of Requirement from Harry Potter. If they need something, they happen to have it, regardless of whether it makes any sense at all.

They have aerial silks, which Ruth can use to practice and get in her gymnastics exercise for the physical education part of her school day, and of course the silks become useful for something else later on. Wagner Moura’s character also recently bought a handgun, so recently that his wife is surprised to find out they have one. Funny how he just happened to buy a gun so he could feel safe right before the force field closed them in. Greta Lee’s character develops a bit of a green thumb and establishes quite the indoor garden, but I’m not really sure where she gets the dirt from. I’m not really sure where she got the seeds from either. Don’t worry about it. If you don’t think about it, you won’t notice it. That’s what the whole lobotomy thing was. It’s your fault for not removing your brain before the film started. Graham has a fish tank in his room, and somehow he has enough fish food and supplies to keep that tank clean, fed, pH balanced, and everything else for as long as the movie needs him to, until the film doesn’t need the fish anymore. Again, kind of impressive. Hell, there’s even a scene where the kids are riding scooters around the house. I don’t know why. It doesn’t really serve a purpose, but it’s one more thing they happened to have inside the house so people could do something.

The film also has a vague answer about their utilities. Wagner Moura says at the beginning that they should treat their utilities as precious commodities while they still have them. Nobody has a phone, but they have electricity, running water, and gas. They can cook, turn the lights on, pull water from the tap, flush toilets, and do all that stuff. Of course, as time passes, these things are eliminated. How? Why? Who knows? The film doesn’t really offer a definite explanation. There’s also a wolf that feels like it could have been a metaphor for something because it continues to walk up and stare at the house, often staring directly at Moura, but they don’t really do anything with that either. Then there’s the rain and the things that come out during it. I don’t know how the animals are thriving. As time progresses and there aren’t humans mowing lawns or maintaining anything, animals start migrating back into these spaces, but it also rains every day like clockwork, and the animals seem bothered by the experience and have to seek shelter. There’s not really an explanation for how all of this coexists.

Greta Lee’s character eventually gets to go on an adventure because her husband goes a little Jack Nicholson in The Shining in the bathroom. Keeping this as light and spoiler-free as possible, considering the work we see Wagner Moura’s character having to do to create the opportunity for her adventure, there’s a major problem with what’s on the other side. The presumption is apparently that everything will just work out, which it does, without much explanation as to how, even though somebody on the other end seemingly would have needed to do the exact same thing Moura was doing, except there’s no one there to do that. They also find that they have some short-range communication equipment, walkie-talkies or something like that, because, again, this house will provide. If they need it, it was already in the house. I also had to laugh when the house starts flooding with so much water that Graham decides to do a “hold my beer” with his father and dives headfirst from the second floor into the flooded first floor. It’s the first floor of your house, not a swimming pool. You have furniture. He’s just nonsensically putting himself at risk instead of thinking about what he’s actually diving into. Dad eventually starts figuring out how to catch animals through a convoluted pulley system that I’m also not 100% sure how he managed to set up. One of the animals is a skunk, which you would think would turn into an immediate regret situation. Anyone who has been remotely near skunk spray knows that stuff goes quite a distance. The skunk didn’t even need to spray anybody specifically. It just needed to spray inside the house, and everyone would be punished by that scent. Missed opportunity.

Then the ending is just bizarre. I can’t really talk about it because there are so many spoilers, and I know that’s the thing everybody is waiting for: the actual ending. Not necessarily all the little beats along the journey, but what does it all mean? What was it all for? This film will not answer that or tell you. It will absolutely give you the weirdest, most confusing ending and then just kind of walk away, leaving you breathless and exhausted from having sat through it. Truly, I don’t understand how people are able to forgive this film for all of its faults. I kept tripping over all of the little conveniences that aren’t well written into the script and are simply provided whenever the movie needs them. At one point, I thought maybe this family wasn’t even real. Maybe they were AI or something, and that’s how they keep getting things. Maybe we were about to find out this was a simulation, and they find everything they need because none of it is real. Nope. That wasn’t it.

The good news is that The Last House has audio description done by International Digital Center and narrated by Jamie Lemcheck, a narrator I’m very familiar with. I love Jamie. I think she’s one of those narrators with such a broad reach in terms of the things she’s able to narrate, and she traverses genres quite well. She works nicely here because this film is sort of a psychological science-fiction thriller that eventually develops a creature-feature aspect. If I had one note for the writer, it would be size relativity. Given those creature-feature elements in the back half of the movie, I was never really sure how big anything was. When you’re describing something from science fiction or fantasy that has no basis in reality, you often need to describe its size in a way that gives us something tangible to compare it to. It’s a little too easy to simply refer to something as big or large because those aren’t necessarily great descriptors. The tree in your backyard can be big. So can the Empire State Building. Those represent wildly different possibilities of size. If Chewbacca is entering a home, you could say he stands slightly taller than the door frame and has to duck as he enters. Now we have something recognizable to use as a comparison. If something standing next to Wagner Moura appears to be twice his size, that works too. It doesn’t have to be precise. It’s about approximating and using something we can give tangible size to and matching that with something we cannot.

I think somewhere in here there’s a good movie, but it really got lost along the way. Super lost. This is like sending your loved one out to get a carton of milk, and an hour later he calls you and tells you he’s halfway down the Great Wall of China. You’re wondering how on earth he got there because that’s definitely not what the assignment was. This is one of the few movies recently that I can say truly does not care that it doesn’t make any sense. It boldly stands in front of you, challenging you, daring you to call it out for not making sense, as if you would have the temerity to do so against its audacity to spew ridiculousness and call it cinema. I apologize to those who enjoyed The Last House and are willing to lobotomize at the door, but I’m just not. The Last House is just not a good movie. Maybe it could have been, but that would have required a very different script from somebody who was paying attention and actually wanted this film to be good instead of just wanting the credibility of having a film on Netflix. The Last House is the last movie you should want to watch. The best thing I can say is exactly what I told my friend: it’s interesting nonsense.

Rotten: 4.5/10