Crew
Director – Louis Leterrier, Screenplay – Matthew Robinson, Producers – Kori Adelson, Peter Chernin, Louis Leterrier, Oly Obst & Jenno Topping, Photography – Pål Ulvik Rokseth, Music – Yair Elazar Glotman, Visual Effects Supervisor – Jan Maroske, Visual Effects/Animation – Industrial Light & Magic, Visual Effects – Red Visual Effects (Supervisor – Lev Kolobov) & Untold Studios (Supervisor – Julien Bolbach), Special Effects Supervisor – Paul Dimmer, Creature Effects Supervisor – Simon Northcott, Production Design – Kevin Jenkins. Production Company – Chernin Entertainment/3 Arts Entertainment.
Cast
Wagner Moura (Jason), Greta Lee (Ann), Riley Chung (Ruth 8 Years Old), Noah Alexander Sosnowski (Graham 12 Years Old), Emma Ho (Ruth 13 Years Old), Gabriel Barbosa (Graham 17 Years Old)
Plot
Husband and wife Jason and Ann and their two children Graham and Ruth wake up one day to find they are unable to leave their house. They try to break windows to get out but as they do something in the rain knits over any break. The same has happened to everybody around the neighbourhood. After surviving for several months on the supplies they have, these begin to run low. A house subsidence causes the top of the chimney to collapse and they are able to improvise a trap that is thrown up out over the top to catch animals. They are able to subsist on these along with rainwater coming down the chimney and vegetables they grown inside. However, there are monsters lurking outside and these begin to close in.
I first became aware of The Last House after reading a news article about a promotional stunt where a man (actor Nathan Stoop) was hired to spend three days (August 6-8, 2026) living inside a house that had been constructed on a billboard on Sunset Boulevard, communicating with passersby using a whiteboard. It seemed bizarre enough a stunt that is made me look up what the film was and then the names attached and premise drew me to the film itself.
The Last House comes from Louis Leterrier, a French director who started out as a Luc Besson associate, directing Unleashed/Danny the Dog (2005) and Transporter 2 (2005). These had Leterrier brought to Hollywood where he settled in as a regular director of A-budget material with the likes of The Incredible Hulk (2008), Clash of the Titans (2010), the hit of Now You See Me (2013), Grimsby (2016), the tv mini-series The Dark Crystal: Age of Resistance (2019) and Fast X (2023). He has also worked as a producer on Wrath of the Titans (2012), Ares (2016) and The Deep House (2021). Moreover, the script comes from Matthew Robinson, who co-directed/wrote The Invention of Lying (2009) and wrote the scripts for Monster Trucks (2016), Dora and the City of Gold (2019), Love and Monsters (2020) and Good Luck, Have Fun, Don’t Die (2025).
There is a whole subset of Post-Apocalyptic films about people facing off or at siege from monsters in the aftermath of civilisation. Examples range from various versions of The Day of the Triffids (1951) to I Am Legend (2007) and more recent likes of A Quiet Place (2018) and sequels, Arcadian (2024), Worldbreaker (2025) and tv’s The Last of Us (2023- ). There has also been another whole mini-genre of films about people who become imprisoned inside their houses, which goes all the way back to Luis Buñuel’s The Exterminating Angel (1962) to the more recent likes of Containment (2015), Await Further Instructions (2018), The Pink Cloud (2021) and Brick (2025).
The set-up for The Last House is a bit of a head-scratcher. It develops problems as the film goes on – I’ll get to that later but the initial imprisonment is solid. One of the issues is that it feels as though Louis Leterrier is straining to make the characters act like a real family. They are defined either by situational melodramas or else cutsie throwaway scenes – learning to gut fish, watching Annie (1982) and Air Force One (1997) over and over – but rarely feel like characters with an ongoing family dynamic.
You do also wonder about how long everybody could plausibly live trapped inside their homes and my feeling is that the film draws their survival out far longer than is believable. The initial food supply in the house seems to last for months before it is ever in danger of running out. With a little A.I. number-crunching, I find that even with a well-stocked larder that the average home of four could probably only last four-to-eight weeks with severe rationing, maybe three months at the outside with doomsday prepper estimates. The other is the power grid magically managing to stay on and active for something like the better part of a year whereas the reality is that without monitoring and maintenance, not to mention upkeep of the fuel supply, any power grid – no matter whether fossil fuel generated or nuclear – would shut down within forty-eight hours or even far less.
The Last House does become somewhat more interesting once it gets the family into improvised survival mode where they go ‘chimney fishing’ and tear up the floorboards to turn the inside of the house into a garden. This has some occasionally ingenuity, even if you feel that the film is stretching how likely they could survive in this way beyond any kind of plausibility. Not to mention that is pushes some of more grim issues to the sideline – there is a suitably nasty scene where the son offers up the pet fish, but other scenes like whether they are going to eat the dog is raised as a possibility but its’ corpse placed in the freezer and then just forgotten.
The strangest part is how The Last House goes from being a survival story that takes a long time to get going but then around the one hour and ten minutes mark suddenly flips over into being something else altogether – a Monster Movie. Shadowy shapes had been lurking around the periphery throughout, but this part finally delivers some tentacle creatures that burst into the house and attack whereupon we get standard scenes fighting off the monster.
These scenes are neither here nor there. The biggest frustration is the lame non-ending the film arrives at. The creatures from the sea are given no real motivation – they just emerge onto land, decide to imprison everybody in their houses with magical rainwater that forms an impenetrable barrier until fairly much everybody on the surface dies off. Why they do this, we are never given any clue. The most frustrating part is the end confrontation – rather than kill one of the creatures Wagner Moura demonstrates mercy and lets it live. Despite the creatures having expended vast amounts of effort killing 99.99% of the human race and this one pursuing them in a to-the-death struggle through the house, it races out of the house with tentacles waving whereupon the other creatures suddenly decide “oops we were wrong” and give up their extermination campaign of humanity and let them live.
Trailer here