WALRUS SCORE: D
Sure, Netflix original movies have earned a reputation for being… well, pretty terrible. But every now and then a trailer comes along that makes me think, “Okay… this actually looks promising.” That’s exactly what happened with The Last House.
The premise immediately hooked me.
What if every house in the world suddenly became locked from the outside? No matter how hard you tried, you couldn’t leave your own home. Days turn into weeks. Weeks turn into years. How would you survive? How would society function? And what caused it? The rain seems connected somehow, but even that appears to have undergone some bizarre molecular transformation.
That’s a fantastic setup for a science fiction film.
I’d personally be dead within a month, but imagine the perfect scenario where you happen to be trapped with a civil engineer and a doctor who also happens to be a botanist. Suddenly your odds improve considerably.
Unfortunately, that’s one of the least ridiculous things about The Last House.
I’m not saying this movie is bad. I’m saying it’s astonishingly bad. It insults your intelligence with almost every scene.
I love science fiction, and I’m more than willing to suspend my disbelief if the story earns it. This movie never does. I can’t go into much detail without wandering into spoiler territory, but let’s just say the plot holes aren’t big enough to drive a truck through—they’re big enough to drive an entire convoy through, stacked on top of each other.
The performances themselves aren’t the problem. The cast is perfectly likable and does what it can with the material. The tragedy is that the filmmakers took an intriguing concept with enormous potential and completely squandered it. It’s almost as if the writers lost interest halfway through the script.
The biggest failure is that the movie never seems interested in answering the questions it asks. Why is this happening? How is it happening? What are the rules? Is there an antagonist? Is there even a protagonist driving the story? The film introduces a monster element, but never develops or explains it in any meaningful way.
Mystery can be compelling. Confusion is not.
In the end, The Last House wastes one of the better high-concept sci-fi premises I’ve seen in years. Instead of exploring the fascinating implications of its idea, it strings together one frustrating decision after another until you’re left wondering why anyone thought this screenplay was ready to film.
If you’re a fan of thoughtful science fiction, I’d skip it. If you’re morbidly curious about how badly a great premise can be mishandled, then by all means give it a watch. It may be one of the clearest examples of Netflix taking a genuinely compelling idea and turning it into something painfully hollow.
