The Last House

Released 2026. Director: Louis Leterrier

SELLING A MOVIE IN TWO MINUTES is not easy and putting together a trailer is as much an art and a sales pitch. More often than not, a trailer gives away too much but not the one for The Last House. Since I saw it two months ago I'd been looking forward to the movie's release because the trailer truly intrigued me. A family is locked inside their home, not for a day, not for a week, but several years. How do they survive? Who or what has trapped everyone inside? What's going on outside? There's so much promise and anticipation I watched the movie as soon as it came out.

Turns out The Last House need not be the first movie on your list. It's a classic case of over-promising and under-delivering. A fascinating, puzzling idea unravels into a limp imitation of Davy Jones from Pirates of the Caribbean.

Let me be fair. The set-up is pretty effective. Wagner Moura and Greta Lee play suburban parents with two kids who find themselves locked in with no way out. All the doors are jammed and the windows sealed shut. They can see their neighbours are in the same predicament and apparently it's happening everywhere. This unexplained phenomenon is accompanied by a persistent rain which makes the situation even more sinister. Phones stop working, no Internet, no TV, no streaming, no contact or news. Ruth, the 8-year-old daughter, says she sees a figure in the rain. Up till now there is a genuine sense of mystery.

When days turn into weeks, the story becomes a survival operation. Food supply dwindles as the family finds ways to keep everyone occupied, though an endless rewatching of Annie sounds like a dreadful option to me. Greta starts to plant vegetables indoors with the seeds she saved. Unlike Wagner, I'm no engineer, but when he makes a trap that flings out of the chimney down the roof to catch small animals, that's when the suspension of disbelief begins to fall apart and we see The Last House is built with sticks and straws.

Skip ahead five years (you read that right; five years!) and the family remains prisoners in their own home but incredibly they're still alive. More shocking perhaps is none of them has lost any weight. The boy Graham is now 17, Ruth is 12, Greta looks exactly the same and Wagner apparently still shaves regularly. How they manage to collect enough rain water indoors to drink, cook and clean will be studied by future historians. How they're still able to start a fire to cook the foxes and squirrels they trap will baffle researchers and for those of us who remember the one great panic of the COVID lockdown: did they stock enough toilet paper?

Jokes aside, even in a fictional crisis like this it stretches credibility to make it five years but I understand why. They need the kids to do grown-up things at the live-or-die climax. So why not start the movie when they're already teens? Ah, they also need the girl to be small enough to climb through the chimney at the start. By painting themselves into a corner, the filmmakers show they haven't really thought the plot through fully to be remotely plausible.

For more than 1,800 days they've managed to stay hidden from the threat outside. Finally we find out who or what it is and the more you think about it, the less sense it makes. It's an enormous leap to introduce mythical sea monsters and suggest they have the power to control global weather and flood entire cities to kill every living person. And yet even as they roam the suburban streets like night patrol somehow they always miss the fact that there are four humans still alive in this house. For five years!

The final confrontation is neither scary nor suspenseful. The family always manage to escape by the skin of their unbrushed teeth in various manners of death-defying strokes of luck, culminating in a moment of psychic connection with one of the beasts that miraculously calls off the attack. Gimme a break.

The filmmakers squandered the first half when they lost sight of its potential as a psychological thriller. There's a whiff of a better story among the plot holes about nature reclaiming the Earth after human's wanton destruction. Sadly it degenerates into a monster mash more suited to a themed park ride.

The bigger mystery is what powers compelled Wagner Moura and Greta Lee to choose this over other films that would at the very least appreciate their talent. Moura and Lee are actors capable of giving nuanced and layered performances as we've seen and been moved by them in The Secret Agent and Past Lives. The Last House is a slapdash effort that a respectable actor would be hesitant to promote with any genuine enthusiasm.

Judge for yourself. Watch the trailer (link below) and you'll see it has intrigue and suspense. And that's the best two minutes you'd get out of it.

Click image above to view trailer. New window will open.