The LastHouse

Here is the idea. It starts raining. A family of four try to leave their house and cannot. There is nothing blocking the door. No lock, no wall, no visible barrier. The door simply will not open. Food runs low. Water runs low. Something is outside. The Last House has one of the best horror hooks Netflix has funded in years, and it wastes almost every minute of it.

Greta Lee and Wagner Moura play the parents. Both of them are excellent actors. Both of them are working very hard here. Neither of them can save a script that treats them like pieces on a board.

The problem is the people

A trapped-in-one-place film lives or dies on whether you believe the people. This one does not give you that chance. The family make decision after decision that no real person would make, and they make them purely because the plot needs the tension to go up in that scene.

Someone opens something they should not open. Someone wanders off alone. Someone keeps a crucial piece of information secret for no reason at all except that revealing it would end the film forty minutes early. You stop being scared and start being annoyed.

The dialogue does not help. There are lines in this film that got a laugh out of me, and none of them were meant to be funny.

It is not allowed to be scary

The rating is a real problem. This is a PG-13 horror film and you feel that limit in every scene. The threat outside stays vague, the violence stays offscreen, and the film keeps building towards moments it is then not permitted to deliver.

Louis Leterrier is a good action director. Lupin is sharp, Now You See Me is fun. But this needs dread, not momentum, and dread is not what he does. The camera keeps moving when it should be sitting still and letting a room feel wrong.

What actually works

Two things. First, the first twenty minutes are genuinely gripping. The moment the door will not open is a great moment, and the early panic feels real.

Second, whenever the film forgets it is science fiction and just becomes a family arguing under pressure, it is much better. Lee and Moura are very good together. A quiet version of this film about a marriage cracking while the food runs out would have been worth watching.

And then the film explains itself, and the explanation is worse than any answer you had come up with on your own. That is the moment it loses you completely.

Should you watch it

Only if you have already seen everything else. A Quiet Place did the trapped family better. Even Netflix's own Brick did the sealed room better, and that was not a great film either. This one has bigger names and a bigger idea and less to say than both.

Watch the first twenty minutes, imagine your own ending, and switch it off. Yours will be better.