Netflix's The Last House feels like an algorithmic remix of other, better movies

It’s no secret that streaming services use data and watching habits to drive decision-making, and no streamer has more data to dig through than Netflix. Which is why the service’s film output can vary dramatically from movie to movie.

You can get star-studded critical hits like crime thriller The Rip (I loved it!), and you can get movies that look really great on paper like The Last House, but ultimately feel like they were concocted by a high-concept word bubble blender.

Directed by Louis Leterrier (Now You See Me, Fast X) and starring Greta Lee and Wagner Moura, the film is one of those classic big mystery movies that start off with a great pitch: What if a family is suddenly locked inside their home by a mysterious force and can’t get out. For days, for weeks, for months… for years?

Moura and Lee absolutely carry the bottle concept of a family stuck in their old, collapsing home for a decade or so. They’re great actors and do a lot of nuanced, emotional things with the material. It’s just… the material itself that’s the problem.

I thought the trailer looked cool when I saw it a while back, and added the film to my watch list. I mean, it had all the things that appeal to me in a movie pitch. Which was the point, right?

I’m a sucker for a high-concept sci-fi mystery — and judging by the fact that this movie is No. 1 on Netflix’s movie chart — I’m not the only one.

This has pieces of A Quiet Place when it comes to the family survival vibe and eventual face off with the mysterious creatures, some visuals evocative of Wes Ball’s post-apocalyptic short Ruin, and a rushed, hopeful finale that could’ve been a Waterworld alternate ending.

But sadly, this movie is very much not A Quiet Place. Or any of its sequels or prequels, when it comes to quality. The Last House is at its best in its first few minutes, when the big mystery and stakes are established as the family realizes they’re unable to leave their home due to a mysterious rain that seems to keep every house in the neighborhood sealed up tight.

The the movie just… drags for the better part of an hour, as we get a few jump scares and reveals as the family gets creative to “chimney fish” for animals with a trap they feed through the broken chimney to catch food to survive, and struggle with their lack of food and resources. It scratches at some interesting ideas, but never really gets to the itch. We also see a woman who seemingly got out of her house (or was trapped outside when the event started), and is suddenly dragged away by mysterious water (or creatures within it).

With the family now under assault by those mysterious, monstrous creatures in the film’s climax, with the water and their house falling down around them, they set up a few Rube Goldberg-style traps to take out the creature. But, twist! The family’s youngest daughter has a theory that the mysterious creatures aren’t alien, but actually an Earth-based mystery from deep in the ocean that finally came to reclaim the land. That turns out to (probably?) be true, as they show sympathy to the creature and the creature just… let’s them go free, after all that.

At that point, the film ends, as we pan out to show pretty much the entire world is covered in water and hardly anyone else has survived. The family sails off to start a new life, when the radio crackles to reveal at least one other survivor is out there waiting to be found.

I’m all for a movie keeping the mystery to itself and parsing out details from a smaller perspective (i.e. a trapped family trying to figure it all out), it’s just this movie haphazardly throws a few half-baked answers at the wall and leaves it at that. This is a movie that started with the high concept, but failed to actually build a good movie around it. Yes, throwing a great cast at it helps, but it doesn’t get you all the way to the finish line.

And yet for all that… it’s still the No. 1 movie on Netflix.

So… yeah. I guess the strategy works, anyway?