2 hours ago
10
Once upon a time, just three decades and a few realities ago, a major American studio released a Hollywood satire about a down-and-out producer whose greatest dream was to make a Z-grade sci-fi movie titled “Chubby Rain,” in which hostile aliens invaded Earth by hiding themselves inside of raindrops (thus making the rain appear chubby). That man’s name was Bowfinger. The comedy that Frank Oz made about him was also called “Bowfinger.” And the joke — the joke that teed up every other joke — was that “Chubby Rain” was obviously a very, very stupid idea for a movie. Even a movie that only cost $2,184.
Netflix’s “The Last House” cost a lot more than that, but god damn is its rain chubby. A thriller so dumb that — in bygone smarter times — a central aspect of its premise was used as a punchline, this late summer washout updates Bowfinger’s masterpiece into an asinine COVID parable where the rain gets so fat that people can no longer go outside. Literally.
What first appears to be a run-of-the-mill Seattle rainstorm is soon revealed to be something more nefarious, as the apparently sentient precipitation seals everyone inside of their homes. Doors are welded shut. Windows are somehow rendered unbreakable. Neighbors are forced to communicate with poster boards like in Zack Snyder’s “Dawn of the Dead.” It’s a good thing that unemployed engineer and hobbyist fisherman Jason (Wagner Moura, hopefully reeling in a decent paycheck) makes it back to his wife Ann (a similarly overqualified Greta Lee) and their two kids before the clouds roll in, otherwise he would have been left to fend for himself amidst the early morning runners and the increasingly feral local wildlife. Oh, and also the giant, shadowy monsters who growl around the lawn whenever it really starts to pour.
Scripted by Matthew Robinson (“Good Luck, Have Fun, Don’t Die”) and functionally directed by old-fashioned “Fast X” hack Louis Leterrier (whose recent creative renaissance has been limited to other Netflix work like “The Dark Crystal: Age of Resistance” and “Lupin”), “The Last House” settles into an undeniably absorbing rhythm as it revisits the height of social distancing with a sinister twist. The Delgado family is fortunate enough to have a fully stocked kitchen and two whole DVDs — “Annie” and “Air Force One” — when they get sealed inside without cell phone service or internet access, and so the vibes are relatively strong inside their house. Jason rigs up some amenities that allow him to feel useful for once, Ann is radiant with can-do mom positivity, and kids Graham (Noah Alexander Sosnowski) and Ruth (Riley Chung) are still young enough to make the best of this strange misadventure. There’s even a Cure-themed montage/dance party!
It’s a bummer that the family’s sweet but aging golden retriever can’t go outside for walks, but at least they have a two-month supply of the dog’s heart medication. That should be enough, right? I mean, Chekhov’s ACE Inhibitor would be a hat on a hat in a movie that’s already introduced Chekhov’s pet fish, and alien invasions usually seem to play out on a more accelerated schedule.
Except, the movie almost immediately waves away the idea that this is an alien invasion, even if it doesn’t really bother to entertain other suggestions until it comes right out with the answer during its wildly anticlimactic final scene. (“Government?” someone wonders on their whiteboard at one point, as if we still had one of those). While CGI spectacle eventually pours onto the screen like so much flood water, “The Last House” is — at least on its face — a lot more concerned with family dynamics in the face of a crisis than it is with the nature of the crisis itself.
The trouble with that is two-fold. The first major problem with that approach is that chubby rain is too silly to stop thinking about. Whether the monsters come in the weather or simply bring it with them, the “how does magic water stop a window from breaking?” of it all can’t help but distract from the film’s characters. It’s a particularly egregious problem in a thriller that would have worked just as well had it removed that detail altogether. After all, “there are big scary monsters who will eat anyone who steps out of their homes for even a minute” would have accomplished the same goal with much less of a headache. Ditto “this rain looks normal but a single drop of it will kill you.”
The other issue is that “The Last House” was in no way designed to be the character-driven saga that its story demands. Lee and Moura do heroic work in shading their roles with depth and distress (you can feel them gripping onto their roles in the nuclear family as they lose faith in themselves), but this is a streaming movie that was made to be watched with one eye, and it lacks the patience to sit with any circumstance for longer than 20 seconds. The kids are even more poorly defined (Ruth’s entire job is to be small and sit with her back to the window so that it looks freakier when a monster shows up behind her), and while that could generously be contextualized as a byproduct of their social deprivation, “The Last House” fails to make anything of their frustrations even as its story begins to skip forward in time. The Delgados roll with the punches better than any real family possibly could in these conditions, and so — absent a greater interest in who these people are — their inevitable unraveling at the end of the second act feels almost as contrived as the concept of raindrops that know how to lock your garage door.
By the time we get there, the house itself has long established itself as the richest and most layered of the film’s characters; production designer Kevin Jenkins created the place from scratch, and built it so that it could grow, rot, and sink in a way that vividly expresses the mindsets of its residents. While this movie often feels like it’s already been clip-farmed, as though it were intentionally shot to be sliced up on social media and overlaid with AI-written narration, Leterrier familiarizes us with the house’s layout in a way that allows every scene to build on the last — a sturdier foundation than is ever required by the weightless survival thriller he builds on top of it.
While Bowfinger’s masterpiece inadvertently became a trenchant showbiz commentary about the way that Hollywood preys on the vulnerabilities of its stars and dreamers alike, “The Last House” never pools together its stray thoughts into anything deeper than a puddle. Not even a chubby puddle. It’s bookended with an environmentalist shrug towards the oceans, and often touches on notions of solidarity and collective strength as its story circles the drain, but this witless movie — destined to become the official Netflix slop of Seattle’s professional hockey team — never amounts to anything more than a thimble of pandemic PTSD that’s spread across 100 severely unrewarding minutes. The rain has rarely been thinner.
Grade: C
“The Last House” is now streaming on Netflix.
English (US) ·