SHIVER ME TIMBERS

Netflix’s Terrifying New Thriller Traps You Inside Forever

Wagner Moura and Greta Lee are trapped in their home by mysterious forces in “The Last House.”

Director M. Night Shyamalan has made a career out of devising intriguing mysteries that have no satisfying explanation or conclusion. The Last House takes that formula and runs with it.

Directed by Louis Leterrier (Now You See Me, Fast X) and headlined by last year’s Best Actor Oscar nominee Wagner Moura (The Secret Agent) and Greta Lee (Past Lives), this Netflix feature (August 7) is a genre throwaway whose set-up is tantalizing and whose pay-off is goofy—though that doesn’t negate its minor cheesy charms. Intermittently gripping if less than totally coherent, it’s a glossy B-movie that doesn’t bore but also never truly thrills.

In a neighborhood that’s eventually revealed to be a suburb of Seattle, Jason (Moura) finishes fishing at a local dock and returns to the home he shares with wife Ann (Greta Lee), son Graham (Noah Alexander Sosnowski), and daughter Ruth (Riley Chung). As he arrives, a storm picks up steam, and the narrator intones that “the day the rain came, we learned we were not alone.”

The following morning, the clan’s phone and internet service go out. Immediately afterward, they discover that their front door won’t open. Neither, it turns out, will any of the residence’s other doors or windows, no matter that they’re technically unlocked. Jason tries to break down the door and smash through windows, but regardless of his muscle, he gets nowhere.

For reasons they can’t comprehend, the family is trapped, and so too are their neighbors, as they realize via shared written messages (on chalk and dry erase boards) with those in their vicinity. Though everyone has their guesses about the cause of this calamity—is it the government? Aliens?—no answers are forthcoming, and Matthew Robinson’s script plays things close to the vest, hunkering down with the protagonists as they strive to confront their situation with calm rationality. That involves regulating food intake and searching for ways out, including by smashing through the walls. Alas, such measures are in vain, with Jason admitting with dismay, “They’ve sealed us in.”

But who exactly are “they?” The Last House has no interest in swiftly identifying the culprits behind this madness. Instead, it focuses on Jason and Ann’s efforts—over the span of years, complete with new actors Gabriel Barbosa and Emma Ho as Graham and Ruth—to create a sustainable environment for themselves and their two kids, be it scheduled schoolwork or impromptu lessons on music (they dance to Jason’s The Cure LP) and movies (they watch an old DVD of Annie).

At the same time, they slowly begin honing their survivalist skills, with Jason teaching his kids how to gut a fish (with the aid of Ruth’s stuffed animals) and Ann starting a makeshift garden—labors that lend a degree of practicality to material that obviously has otherworldly underpinnings.

The Last House’s concentration on these individuals’ day-to-day attempts to fashion a new domestic paradigm is to its benefit, grounding the proceedings in something approaching a believable quasi-pandemic-y reality and allowing its leads to develop their characters’ increasingly frazzled and desperate dispositions.

Moura’s Jason is a hard-headed man of action who assumes responsibility for the continued safety of his family, to the point of extremeness—and that’s setting aside the fact that, pre-catastrophe, he purchased a handgun. Ann, meanwhile, is the household’s calming force, there to keep things on the rails even when outside elements and Jason threaten to heighten tensions.

Moura and Lee bring heft to The Last House, and it needs it, since its story is more than a bit sub-Shyamalan silly. The family home has an unstable foundation and is being held up by a cracked chimney, and before long, Ruth starts talking about the “rain walker” she sees in the dark outside their enclosure. More important to Jason and Ann, however, is maintaining a food supply.

To that end, the former—handily, an engineer by trade—devises a contraption that allows them to catch critters on their backyard patio. This device is only sorta-kinda believable, which makes it a lot like the rest of the film, whose implausible moments pile up, be it Jason trying to kick down a door that swings inward or a late Ruth decision that proves a contrived means of upping the urgency.

There are things lurking in this oft-soggy world, and The Last House teases their nature and powers. Those revelations are dispiriting to say the least, and the director doesn’t help by employing predictable tactics: silhouetted snapshots of the fiends, followed by scattered glimpses of them moving fast through the frame and, finally, darkly lit portraits of them in all their semi-distinct CG blahness.

To reveal more about them would be to spoil one of the film’s few surprises (the best I can do is make a veiled reference to Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man’s Chest). Yet it’s giving nothing away to state that they’re underwhelming, and Leterrier and Robinson exacerbate that problem by keeping their origins and purpose vague to the point of non-existence.

There’s much computer-generated sound and fury in the closing third of The Last House, and that energy knocks the film out of its static doldrums. Unfortunately, it’s only passably suspenseful, given that it quickly becomes clear that calamitous attacks will end in close calls and MacGyver-esque inventions and traps will save the day.

At least Leterrier knows how to helm this watery commotion with reasonable aplomb—his set pieces have a shiny sheen and fleet agility—and his cast screams and fights with convincing desperation. Those aren’t insignificant pluses, and they moderately offset a plot whose extraordinary developments are meant to be taken at face value rather than thought about for a second, considering that doing the latter exposes the entire endeavor as half-baked.

Alternating on a dime between sensible logistics and careless fantasy, The Last House won’t win Moura or Lee award-season huzzahs, nor does it reinvent the eco-horror-survivalist wheel. Still, as a supernaturally oriented diversion starring accomplished actors and helmed by a filmmaker who knows how to assemble and orchestrate a spectacular, it’s the type of programmer that, with a little promotional push, could make a decent splash on Netflix.

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Nick SchagerEntertainment Critic

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