It’s always nice to see Wagner Moura and Greta Lee on screen, even when the movie surrounding them isn’t particularly good. Moura has been on a pretty inspired run lately, between Civil War and The Secret Agent, while Lee’s recent output has been a bit more uneven. Even so, I find her to be such a warmly compelling presence that she often feels overqualified for the material she’s given, as was the case with TRON: Ares and A House of Dynamite. Unfortunately, The Last House is another example of that.
The latest from Louis Leterrier follows a family of four who suddenly find themselves sealed inside their home by a seemingly endless rainstorm. The storm isn’t merely dangerous weather, either. Strange, kraken-like creatures surround the house, making the doors impossible to open and the windows impossible to break through, leaving the family to ration their dwindling food supply while trying to figure out exactly what has trapped them inside.
It’s a premise that could work as a contained survival thriller, but The Last House has much bigger thematic ambitions than its basic setup can support. What begins as a story about a family trying to survive an inexplicable disaster eventually becomes a heavy-handed allegory about environmental responsibility, human connection, and learning to coexist with things we don’t understand. The problem is that the movie never finds an especially interesting way to communicate any of those ideas.
Instead, it spends a considerable amount of time having its characters theorize about what’s happening around them. Is the government responsible? Is this some kind of conspiracy? How could anyone possibly be capable of locking everyone inside their homes simultaneously? The questions themselves aren’t necessarily unreasonable for people trapped inside their house during an unexplained catastrophe, but the movie keeps returning to them without building much tension or intrigue in the process.
The survival elements aren’t much better. The family begins rationing food, eventually realizing that they’ll need to find other ways to feed themselves as their supplies run out. That leads to a particularly unpleasant stretch involving the family dog and their consideration of using it for food, followed by attempts to trap animals using a makeshift contraption built around their chimney.
I’m usually not particularly interested in pet violence in movies to begin with, but The Last House really lost me here because none of it felt earned. It’s emotionally manipulative in a way that feels designed to force a reaction rather than organically arrive at one, and once the movie went down that road, I found myself increasingly resistant to whatever it was trying to say.
That becomes a larger problem because the movie’s central metaphor is so blunt. There’s an obvious COVID-era allegory running through the whole thing: everyone is isolated inside their homes, resources are dwindling, paranoia takes over, and eventually the characters discover that the things they feared aren’t necessarily as monstrous as they assumed. The ultimate message seems to be that we should be kinder to one another and to the things we don’t understand, including the literal monsters outside their doors.
Fine. But The Last House delivers that message with almost no subtlety or ingenuity. The creatures themselves don’t help much either. They’re rendered with the kind of glossy, unfinished CGI that immediately reminds you you’re watching a Netflix original rather than a carefully crafted creature feature. Their presence should be frightening, but there’s rarely enough visual or thematic imagination behind them to make them feel like anything more than a mechanism keeping the family trapped inside.
That’s especially unfortunate because the cast is so much better than this material. Moura and Lee play Jason and Ann, the parents at the center of the story, and while both are perfectly fine individually, I never really bought them as a couple. That’s a particularly frustrating problem when you’re dealing with two performers as talented as these. Moura’s work in The Secret Agent and Lee’s performance in Past Lives are among my favorite performances of the 2020s, and watching both of them reduced to characters who spend much of the movie explaining their circumstances out loud feels like an enormous missed opportunity.
That Netflix-style exposition becomes one of the movie’s most persistent annoyances. Characters constantly verbalize what is happening, what they’ve already learned, what they’re currently feeling, and what they think might happen next. It gives the movie the strange sensation of being written for an audience that’s expected to multitask while watching. God forbid we actually have to pay attention to a movie and remember what happened five minutes ago.
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Leterrier doesn’t exactly have a track record that inspires much confidence here, either. I’ve never been particularly fond of Now You See Me or Fast X, and while I have a weird personal fondness for The Incredible Hulk because I grew up with it, I can acknowledge that nostalgia doesn’t necessarily make it a good movie. The Last House feels like another example of a director who can competently move a large-scale production around but doesn’t seem particularly equipped to handle the existential or thematic weight this story is asking him to carry.
And that’s really the frustrating thing about the movie. There’s a potentially compelling contained thriller buried somewhere inside this premise. A family trapped in their home while an unknowable force surrounds them, forcing them to confront dwindling resources, paranoia, and their own assumptions about what’s happening outside could have made for a genuinely tense movie. Instead, The Last House keeps stopping to explain itself until whatever mystery or suspense it might have generated has largely evaporated.
Score: 3/10
The Last House (2026)
- Cast: Greta Lee, Wagner Moura
- Director: Louis Leterrier
- Genre: Horror, Science Fiction, Thriller
- Runtime: 110 minutes
- Rated: PG-13
- Release Date: August 7, 2026
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