The Last House

If you’re not familiar with The Last House, you just may not have been online recently. The Last House is a Netflix exclusive movie, made popular by a viral marketing stunt where they had a man “living” inside of a Billboard in LA for several days, communicating with the crowd below via a whiteboard. Apparently to make sure he was eating, a group sent a pizza up to him, to which he responded “I’m vegan :(“. But enough on the marketing, what we need to decide is does the movie match up to the cool stunt or does it feel stranded in the catalogue of Netflix movies?

The movie starts in what I suppose is the suburbs of the Pacific North West outside of Seattle, Washington, as a massive rainstorm rolls in just before Christmas. When leaving to go get a Christmas tree, the family realizes that none of the exterior doors or windows in the house will open, leaving them trapped inside. It quickly becomes apparent that they’re not the only ones trapped inside their homes by this mysterious force. The concept is.. interesting. Everyone has to communicate via chalkboards or whiteboards as internet and cellular services are disrupted.

The movie quickly moves to the survival genre as the family learns how to adapt while trying to continue life as normal as possible.

There are some implications the movie doesn’t really touch on. Such as how while being stuck in the house, they never run into a problem with trash overflowing. Or how things like water and power grids are still working. One can assume that while everyone got stuck these workers did too; but they would need to get to outside drainage systems or transformers to keep everything running. Or if it’s raining non-stop, why the world isn’t flooding. We’ve seen Sharknado, we know that them rain waters rise up really quick.

The biggest issue with the film is that nothing happens. The movie is just about surviving when you can’t leave your house. The most interesting concept that the movie shows is adaptation and how the world heals when humans aren’t destroying it.

Ultimately, the movie doesn’t do much until the very end. It sits somewhere between sci-fi, thriller, and horror. But it doesn’t do any of the three particularly well. Only at the very end does anything happen outside of “We’ll survive” and even then, the ending just feels closer to “I wish they didn’t bother”.

I give this one a pass. Your time is better spent watching something else. What that is is up to you, because most anything will be better than this.

Score: 1 Annie DVD
What kind of score is even that?

Spoiler Review

Honestly, this movie just isn’t very fun. I’m all for a movie being focused around a single location or having a very limited cast that can’t interact outside of their bubble. I was a big fan of Project Hail Mary. But this film doesn’t really try for anything interesting. It’s pretty run of the mill on “How do you survive when food is out and you can’t leave your house”? I’ll admit that it’s done pretty well, but it’s all incredibly boring.

We start the movie seeing water running to the locks. I guess this magic water has the ability to glue doors closed and make glass unbreakable. But you have to wonder why then the water, or whatever is controlling it, decides not to enter the house and just flood everyone out? This goes as far as the water to the house, such as sinks and toilets. Why are these not moving into the house? I suppose that the eventual squid creatures are treating humans like an aquarium? They’re escaping the ocean and going up on land to watch the humans from their own windows so they have no desire to kill them until they began to revolt? They wait until the very end of the movie to flood the house so they had the ability to do this all along - which is evident anyway that they can shape the rain as they see fit. It really feels that the writers were going with an allegory here of “Humans think they’re the alpha creature because they control the land. But if something equally intelligent could control land, they’d be the ones confined and watched like pets”. If this is the case though, wouldn’t the squid be working to ensure survival of their new pets? Making sure they have food and water? And if you want to go with “Well, they let them survive on their own by making their own greenhouses,” sure, but then why did the squid go into the house to kill all the crops with the salt water? It felt more like “We want to kill you. But we’re way too lazy so just kinda die out on your own terms”.

The storm is a bit inconsistent. I guess it’s supposed to indicate that the squids are on land and actively roaming but that’s never made entirely clear. But the reason why this doesn’t really make sense is because the movie effectively starts with the storm. And quickly we look outside and see it’s not raining any longer. The rain eventually resumes, and once it again stops and that’s when Jason tries the door to see if it can now be opened. Even later on, Graham says “You hear that? The rain’s stopped.” Why is he calling this out as if it’s not stopped until this point? We’ve seen it stop, we’ve seen them try to open the doors. What makes this time so special? Clearly the answer was nothing because they still couldn’t get out of the house. But up until they learn to close the shades during the storm they don’t actually see any of the squid creatures through the many storms.

As a side note, what if someone had their door open when the storm first hit? Were they able to come and go as they please? I get that we can see that the squids can open and close the doors, and maybe any that were open they shut and sealed. But there’s a bit of a lapse of logic here in my opinion. And likewise, the girl that was running. It took several weeks to go back to her when she shows up outside the window. Where was she this entire time? Was she just out there vibing in the rain?

I would be a fan that the squids were left ambiguous through the first hour and 10 minutes of the movie. It should leave us wondering what we were up against. Except the very opening quote of the movie ruins this intrigue anyway. “How inappropriate to call this planet Earth when it is clearly Ocean”. I’m always a fan of “Show, don’t tell”. Immediately they’re telling us that whatever they’re setting up for isn’t out of this world as the characters suggest and think, but something from the depths of the ocean. 30 seconds in and the movie fails at setting up intrigue over the next two hours. And squid and octopuses (yes, I know it sounds wrong but I assure you octopuses is the correct plural) are known to be highly intelligent. Within the first 30 seconds you kind of already know what the twist is going to be.

I did find it somewhat interesting that the film goes 5 years later. After 5 years with no exposure to the outside world, no exposure to other people; Graham and Ruth should have serious arrested development. They’re not given a chance to grow. But that’s never explored. Granted Ruth is 13 at this point, but Graham is 17. They should both be acting very childlike since they had no influence to mature. Also pretty convenient that when we get “5 years later” is when Jason decides to cut his hair. You have to love convenient contrivance.

There were a couple (the same) things that just didn’t make sense. Jason is an engineer, but unless he’s bio-engineering fuel, how did he manage to start his thunderbird he restored. Or the boat that they took at the very end of the movie. Fuel does not sit for years. He would have had to create his own fuel source for either one to work. Also can we talk about how dumb it is to start that thunderbird in the enclosed garage? Hello, carbon monoxide poisoning?

Next up - how did Ana make it into the neighbors house? I get that the sewers are connecting the entire neighborhood. But specifically - how did she even surface in their house? They had to find a sunken spot of their own house to rip through the concrete and get into the sewer. And I know she said that the neighbors house looks like it was flooded for years. But does this mean that the toilet hookup was so rotted she was able to push straight through it? When she moves to escape she goes into the basement and directly into the sewer from there? The entire series of events here has me scratching my head wondering if they just couldn't come up with something that made sense and decided to just yada-yada it away. Or maybe I was concussed like Jason should have been and this was all explained and I just couldn’t make heads or tails of any of it. I don’t know.

I also don’t entirely understand their escape plan. They make it seem that they’re under the assumption that there’s only one of these giant squid creatures taking over the planet. Even if they escape, aren’t they now on the outside fighting these things off to survive - where the squids have the advantage? Surely they have to know there’s more than one out there just locking down the entire world and making it rain on command. And why do the squid even just let them escape anyway? Do they just retreat back to the ocean and say “Yeah sure ok the humans can have the world back because this group of four fought us”. What kind of ending is that for a being that’s equally as intelligent to us? If they were equally intelligent, shouldn’t there be a peace pact? Especially when Jason freed, I guess the queen squid? They could have steered into the direction of “Humans hunt us in the water - but they’re not all bad, just like we hunted them but we’re not actually bad. Let’s have peace with them and let them have their land back”. Instead the squid get a yelling at and they all retreat after terrorizing the humans for years.

My last complaint about the movie is they show the world is flooded. We see the Space Needle in Seattle and the water is almost to the top of it. But why did this water not come towards the suburbs? The squid were OK to flood the city, but decided to leave the suburbs as just a lush farm that the eco-system took back over from the humans?

At the very end it feels like they’re setting up for a sequel. It sounds like Ruth finds someone on the radio who also survived. I hope not because I can’t imagine that being any better than this one or offering anything interesting after they showed a lack of care on this one.

The premise of this movie was much better than the execution. I don’t know what I’d have done differently, but I think my answer would be “shelve this idea”. I’d love to know what others think so leave your thoughts below. Did this movie live up to the hype for you? Or do you wish it got swept out to sea?