The Last House

As an unexpected rainstorm begins outside, a family of four find themselves suddenly and inexplicably sealed inside their home with no way out. As the days stretch into weeks, and then on into years, the family must work together if they want to survive against the threat of both their dwindling resources and the strange creatures lurking outside.

I enjoy the post-apocalyptic survival genre.

I like the general look of it, all the ruined buildings tangled with overgrown greenery, the abandoned cars crumbling into rust, the empty streets, the quiet. I like the look of the collapse of the old world as a setting for stories about the birth of the new world. I also like the kinds of world-building and tropes you commonly see in these kinds of stories, the ad-hoc communities, the road wars, the lone wanderer, the lost histories, and the journey to rediscover a once familiar world. That's fun stuff. Plus, I enjoy it when characters are clever in their scavenging and their resource creation and their fort-building. Especially their fort-building. The building of a good fort is an easy way to my heart. So, whenever a movie or tv show indicates that this is the type of setting it will be playing around in, I tune in.

And this is what The Last House showed me in its trailer.

Not all of the tropes, of course, but some of them. Maybe. Enough to make me curious. Enough to make me want to check it out at least. Plus, I like Greta Lee and Wagner Moura, so I'll give it a chance.

But...

Originally, the Last House was called 11817, which is the house in questions’s address. As far as titles go, it's only slightly better than its eventual title. Shit titles aside, this kind of vague title swapping uncertainty is usually a bad sign with projects. It means your story is too unfocused, and as a result, you can't sum it up succinctly enough. So you stumble around, trying to find something that sticks, but nothing does, so you end up settling on the thing that basically doesn't work the least. And that is obviously what happened here, as once the film is over, it's unclear why this film is even called The Last House. Not to jump ahead in the review, but the fact that they couldn't land on a good title, and what that means when that happens with a project, is the entire heart with what's wrong with this movie.

What's it about?

Nothing.

Also, this film was directed by Louis Leterrier, who directed the Transporter, the Transporter 2, the Ed Norton version of The Incredible Hulk, the attempted reboot of the Clash of the Titans, that movie about party magicians, Now You See Me, and of course, Fast X, which is super dumb. The film itself is based off a screenplay by Matthew Robinson, a person whose resume includes being a former podcaster, and also a member of a “satirical” and mostly made up of white people rap group called the Trilambs, whose stated purpose was to “mock the excessive, materialistic, and stereotypical tropes of mainstream rap culture.” That's a real big sigh and a whole lot of side-eye from your boy on that shit. Luckily, the Trilambs only put out one album. Robinson also wrote the Ricky Gervais film, The Invention of Lying, which was a special kind of awful, as well as the screenplay for Monster Trucks, the story of a young junkyard employee who bonds with a strange creature that lives inside of his truck, and then they race the truck or something.

I've never seen it, but...

Honestly, this is a lot of very concerning red flags for a movie to throw at a guy before he's even had a chance to hit play.

I guess we shall see...

“How inappropriate to call this planet Earth when it’s clearly Ocean.” — Arthur C. Clarke

Jason Delgado is an unemployed engineer who apparently spends his day idly fishing instead of looking for a new job. One day, he sees an unusual-looking storm coming in, so he gathers his pole and heads back to his suburban Seattle house, arriving home just as the rain starts.

Jason finds his wife Ann still in bed. This either means that when we assumed it was afternoon, we were wrong, because it's actually morning, OR… that Ann is also unemployed, and is also not looking for a job. The latter makes the most sense, as they live in a house that looks like it's one windstorm away from collapsing.

The couple also have two children, Graham, a whiny 13-ish years old, and Ruth, an annoyingly precocious 10-ish years old who is still prone to temper tantrums. They also have a dog Cassidy, who is old, takes heart medicione, and is very good boy.

Also, it’s a week or two from Christmas, which is only apparent in Seattle from the obnoxious yard ornaments, but when the family decides to head out and pick out a Christmas tree, they discover something weird…

They can’t get out of the house.

The front door won’t open. In fact, none of their doors will open. Neither will the windows. They try, but they can’t break through them either. They also can’t break through the walls or the floor. The rainwater has seemingly created a barrier that is keeping them inside the house. Their Internet and phones no longer connect to the WiFi either. Up and down their street, that they could see, their neighbors seem to be similarly isolated and trapped too, while others are stranded outside. According to a hand-drawn sign one neighbor holds up, this is happening all over the world...

But the electricity still works, and they still have water, so they wait.

But after two days of being trapped inside, Jason and Ann start to get concerned, so they begin rationing food and water. They start homeschooling their annoying children too, even teaching them basic survival skills. In the weeks that follow, Ann works on an indoor garden, and Jason builds a water reclamation system. During this time, when it rains, Ruth starts to notice a creature outside, and believes it to be friendly. However, when she mentions this to her family, they dismiss it out of hand as nonsense.

Two months later, one of the neighbors who was trapped outside, Susan, suddenly appears at their windows, panicking and pounding on the glass, pleading to get in. She has a bloody knife and is screaming that no one is left, that the family needs to hide, and to not let ”them” see them. Then something yanks her away, screaming, disappearing into the gray rain.

Later, during a particularly bad storm, the house's chimney crumbles, and is now fully open to the sky. (I don’t know why the rain doesn’t cover this gap.) They hoist Ruth up the chimney, and even though she is too big to go outside, she is still able to stick her hand up and reach the outside. Soon after, their sweet old dog Cassidy is suffering after his medicine runs out. Jason puts him out of his misery, but he and Ann agree to keep his remains in the freezer… just in case.

The power grid finally collapses.

Five years pass…

Still stuck in the house, the family has torn up the floors to plant an even bigger garden, and have a bigger water collection system set up, as well as a small animal trap that they send up the ceiling and dangle in the backyard, using the remains of their faithful old dog as bait. Their clothes are ragged and patched and they are in desperate need of a visit to the salon. Their house looks like a rich kid hippy house, there's shitty art all over.

Over the course of the past few years, the children have grown older and much more stupid and annoying. They regularly throw tantrums because they can't go outside, depite being fully aware that it's not their parents' decision, because their house is sealed shut, and also, even if they could leave, there are some strange and dangerous monsters prowling around out there, especially when it rains. Because of this, they often have to cover their windows and hide when the rains come, as they seem to think that the monsters don't know they're inside the house, even though they turn on lights regularly and watch movies and play music?

I don't know. Whatever.

Basically, they all look tired and pale and like they probably smell, and they hate each other because they're all assholes, especially the son, who is unnecessarily a huge piece of shit, even for a teenage boy. During this time, desperate to get away from his awful children, Jason follows the cracks in the house's floor and finds an opening where water is draining, and deduces that the house is sinking because the water barrier has shifted.

Why does he think this? Who knows.

One day, the front door suddenly opens, and a slimy and tentacled creature–kind of like an octopus man, but not the cool Bill Nighy Davy Jones version from Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest–enters. The family hide about the house, and the creature lumbers about, seeming to be looking for them, while poisoning their garden and their fresh water supplies and breathing really loudly. Then it leaves and reseals the house, an act which seems to indicate that it knows they're in there, because otherwise, why bother resealing the house? Anyway, during this, Ruth gets some of the creature's splatter on her, so she puts it in her mouth like a dumbass, and it turns out that it's salt water.

Then, while Jason, Ann, and Graham are yelling about the ruined garden and water, Ruth decides that the wild ferret their trap has caught is too cute to eat and inexplicably tries to let it out of the trap inside the house, and she is immediately bitten. This results in Ruth getting super rabies, as within an hour she is buring up with fever, sweating, moaning, and tossing about in the bed.

Deciding that the retired dentist across the street must have antibiotics in house, despite the fact that it's been five years, so if he did, then they're probably expired (and also... why would you think that a retired dentist would have antibiotics in his house), Ann uses the sewage pipes, wading through familial poop, to cross beneath the street and enter their neighbor's house surprisingly easily by knocking down one of their basement walls. Inside, she finds some very dead neighbors, some very expired antibiotics, and also one of the tentacled creatures. She shoots the creature several times, angering it, before losing their only gun in the poop water, and then barely escaping back into their home, where they collapse the sewer pipes behind them. Luckily, all of the antibiotics that Ann found, despite being expired, were supercharged antibiotics, and after one pill, Ruth is up and moving about almost immediately, her rabies cured.

This is good, because, they now know for sure that the creatures knows they're in the house, so the family does an A-Team montage, as they make weapons and lay Home Alone-esque traps around the house.

The next time it rains, the house floods as the creature enters, and the family is forced to the attic. But they manage to trap the creature before they drown, and the water recedes. Jason stops short of killing the sea monster when Ruth insists. This act of mercy touches the creature's heart, and it opens the front door, letting them leave, and also calling off the other tentacled creatures. Outside for the first time in years, the family watches as the rain stops and their house collapses in a sink hole, and then discover that downtown Seattle is now almost completely submerged, so they take another neighbor's sailboat, name the boat after their dog, and sail away, using the raido to call for other survivors.

The End.

This is a terrible movie for so many reasons.

Mostly, it's terrible because it feels so half-ass and cobbled-together, nothing but an imminently forgettable waste-of-time film, shallow and thin, lacking character development or anything interesting to say about its obvious metaphor, all while cribbing most of its ideas from a slew of vastly superior films. But even worse, this is the kind of film where if you think about it at all, the story collapses, making less and less sense the more you poke at it, which is bad news for the fim, because it barely made any sense to start.

Plus, the choice to use voice-over narration is some truly hacky bullshit.

Obviously, this is an unrealistic situation, nothing but sci-fi nonsense, and to be fair, the story does try to answer some rough questions about the whole situation, at least... at times, sort of. Like, where is the dog is going to poop? And later, how would you look at the family pet as supplies begin to dwindle? And that's on top of the big one... what kind of supplies do you actually have on hand? In this ongoing COVID-wrecked world, I bet most of us with a brain now have extra stuff set aside, but in pre-COVID times, how much food and supplies would you reasonably have on hand at any moment? And what do you do when you start to run out and can't get more? Of course, the film makes no mention of their toilet paper situation, but that's probably for the best, because it must've gotten pretty messy pretty fast, and nobody wants to see that. Also, I appreciated how the film made a case for physical media... the streamers won't work in the apocalypse, after all, but your records and dvds will (if you have power, of course).

But that stuff is all over-shadowed by the film's main problem. In fact, that stuff actually kind of highlight the main problem. Because in order to even think about approaching those questions–which, to be honest, the film really only does a so-so job at answering–you need to have a reason for why they're even questions. Why are they trapped in the house in the first place?

Unfortunately, the answer they've got for that one is super dumb.

Now, with genre films, sometimes you have to just roll with the nonsense, right? Sea monsters are flooding the whole world for reasons, and then they're going to the still dry areas, under the cloak of rain, and hunting the human survivors, also for reasons. To facilitate this effort, the rainwater is sealing the humans in their houses and cars and stores or whatever, making it so they are unable to open the doors or windows or break out in any way, because the sea monsters also control the water apparently.

Okay, fine. Sure. I mean, this is an iffy premise, but okay, lets roll with it.

But that's when it all falls apart. Five plus years being unable to leave the house makes no sense at all. Then you throw in expired antibiotics, indoor gardens with barely any sunny days, no toilet paper, no flush toilets without a lot of water on hand, a sailboat that is still seaworthy after five plus years exposed to the elements, the way the rain shield covers some places in the house but not others. These are all things that are glossed over by the film, because to do otherwise would mean admitting that the story doesn't work. It's cheating for the convenience of the tale. And sure, sometimes this is fine to do, as long as the story is good.

But the story isn't good.

There's no character work. This is a family, and yet what do we know about who they are, how they came to be, who they were before the rains, who they wanted to be, where they were going, and what are their plans now. Besides "This sucks and I hate it," we see no arcs for any of them, and this is all the worse because the film has the time to get into that kind of stuff.

It just... doesn't.

And then there's the sea monsters. What do they want? Even if we spitball and say that they want to kill all humans because of pollution, maybe, okay... but then why do they just give up and go home after one family spares one of them? Besides the fact that this was an ending that felt more like "welp, we're out of time, let's wrap this up," then it did in any kind of narratively satisfying way, what's the conflict here? And why the chage of heart? Was that creature the sea monster king? Why do they get to decide that the war is over? And even nerdier? What exactly is the rain is doing for these deep sea monsters, these deep sea monsters who can apparently walk on land and breathe the air? Is it just keeping them moist? Admittedly, I am assuming that they're deep sea monsters here, because we're never told, but we've never seen them before, and the entire premise of most sea related horror/sci-fi stuff is based on the idea that "75% of the world is covered by water. Most of that is unexplored. Who knows what's down there," right? So, I'm assuming they're deep sea creatures who have had enough of humanity's shit, but that's just me assuming, because the film sure as shit doesn't say either way. Also, if that's true, if I'm right, and they are actually deep sea monsters, how were they not all killed by The Bends because of the drop in pressure when they came up to the surface?

I mean, we've all seen The Abyss...

And on top of that... how is this even a worldwide problem? At first, as you're watching the movie, you think maybe the family doesn't really turn on the news, because they’re a modern family with no tv antenna, but as the film progresses and the situation becomes clear, you realize that the main reason why they only imply that the entire world is similarly affected, but don't turn on the news to prove it, is because there’s no way that this “threat” is still a threat at all like... 10ish miles inland from any coast.

Y'know how you know this?

At the end of the film, you can clearly see the space needle and the rest of downtown Seattle. They're submerged quite a bit sure, but they are still clearly visible from a hill within the Seattle city limits. Down by the water, Seattle is a city that is basically at sea-level, but then rises quickly into surrounding hills. If those hills are not underwater, then neither is a majority of the planet. So why isn't the rest of the planet showing up with guns? And then, related to the question of how is that sailboat still seaworthy after five years out in the elements, if the world is flooded, which again... it obviously is not... what kind of dimwit sails their only sailboat between a bunch of half-submerged buildings? Do you want to tear a hole in your hull? But more importantly, the bigger questions... Why take a sailboat at all? Just head east, you dummies! Dry land is not a myth! I've seen it!

This movie is nonsense. Nothing but nonsense.

Now, granted these are all just a bunch of silly questions extropolated from a very silly premise, but they're the ones who left all these gaping holes among their own self-stated set of rules, I'm just tripping on them.

So obviously, the metaphor here is that this is clearly a Covid movie. And just as obvious, the metaphor was the first and most dominating thought they had while they set about to make this film, all while the actual story was something they left to hopefully cobble together later. But the end result is The Last House is a weird premise and a complete failure. And the worst part is, I can’t tell from watching the film if the whole point of this movie is that it thinks Covid was fake and that did real damage to the world, or that it knows that COVID was real and that is what did real damage to the world.

That said, I did enjoy them trying to light a sea monster on fire.

Boring and perfunctory, and doing everything you expect it to do, pretty much exactly when you expect it to happen, but not in any way that is interesting or fun or new, The Last House is neither exciting, scary, or thematically interesting, it's just soggy moldering garbage.

Hard pass.