The Last House
Wagner Moura and Greta Lee bring human ballast to a genuinely gripping survival thriller.
The house rules: Greta Lee, Wagner Moura and Riley Chung
Photo courtesy of Netflix.
by JAMES CAMERON-WILSON
When the end of the world comes, we have no idea what form it will take. The great futurist and undersea explorer Arthur C. Clarke sets the tone when The Last House opens with his quote, “how inappropriate to call this planet Earth, when it is clearly Ocean.” Then a woman’s voice murmurs on the soundtrack, “everybody remembers where they were the day the rain came…”
It was a day like any other when out-of-work engineer Jason Delgado (Wagner Moura) pulls into his drive in suburban Seattle, although a voice on the car radio reports that December had been the warmest on record. It’s already starting to rain, but otherwise it seems like business as usual, with only the garage door remote refusing to work. It’s a small thing, but it turns out to be the difference between life and death…
The less one knows about what happens in these early stages the better, as surprise is one of the film’s strongest suits. Here is a typical nuclear American family, with a loving mom and dad (Moura and Greta Lee), a 12-year-old son and eight-year-old daughter. A slight difference is that Dad has a heavy Brazilian accent and his wife Anne is Asian and that they’re played by a pair of actors one wouldn’t normally associate with a common-or-garden thriller. Indeed, like John Krasinski and Emily Blunt in the not dissimilar A Quiet Place, they add considerable grist to the drama that ensues. This after all is from the keyboard and imagination of Matthew Robinson, he who previously penned The Invention of Lying (with Ricky Gervais), the post-apocalyptic Love and Monsters and the simply wild and brilliant sci-fi farce Good Luck, Have Fun, Don't Die.
Robinson knows what does and what doesn’t work and the research he must have put into the details of this survival thriller is phenomenal. Anne and Jason Delgado are struggling to pay their bills, and somebody is coming round next week to look at the cracks in the chimney. The house, it seems, is literally falling apart around them. And it keeps raining. Then the front door gets jammed and Jason is unable to break through the glass of the windows, because this is real glass, not the sugar-coated stuff you get in most action-thrillers. And so the Delgados find themselves imprisoned in their own house, although they can see that their neighbours (who, shamefully, Jason is unable to name) are trapped in their homes as well. And then the internet goes down…
Most of us take our utilities for granted, but which do you reckon you could do without? The internet? Electricity? Water? Medication? Food? Gradually, the Delgados realise that they can but rely on each other and that familial harmony is one of the strongest glues for survival in the tool box. “Trust me,” Jason keeps telling his family, “we’ll survive this.” With Lee and Moura leading the way, this is quite an accomplished thriller and because of the human dynamic, the thrills are legitimately thrilling. One should also mention the director Louis Leterrier, who knows how to turn on the adrenalin taps, having previously brought us Now You See Me and Fast X. All in all, this is a most unexpected treat from the Netflix stable.
Cast: Greta Lee, Wagner Moura, Riley Chung, Noah Alexander Sosnowski, Emma Ho, Gabriel Barbosa.
Dir Louis Leterrier, Pro Peter Chernin, Jenno Topping, Kori Adelson, Louis Leterrier and Oly Obst, Screenplay Matthew Robinson, Ph Pål Ulvik Rokseth, Pro Des Kevin Jenkins, Ed Adam Gough, Music Yair Elazar Glotman, Costumes Jane Petrie, Sound Mike Fentum, Paul Corley and Koenraad Ecker.
Chernin Entertainment/3 Arts Entertainment-Netflix.
112 mins. USA. 2026. UK and US Rel: 7 August 2026. Cert. 12.
