‘The Last House’ captures lockdown dread but overstays its welcome

The trauma of the pandemic lockdown is slowly making its way into movies.

There was the terrible “Inside” (2023), with Willem Dafoe as an art thief who can’t escape the house he’s burglarized. Then there was the superior German film, “Brick” (2025), about urban dwellers stuck behind a brick wall that’s keeping them inside their apartments. 

Now there’s “The Last House,” about a suburban family of four who find themselves locked inside their home.

In a way, “The Last House” is the most ambitious of the films, taking place over a longer scope of time. At its center are two charismatic leads, Wagner Moura (“The Secret Agent”) and Greta Lee (“Past Lives,” “Toy Story 5”), actors audiences have yet to be sick of yet and continue to enjoy even as we share a long 110 minutes with them in confinement.

To its credit, the movie captures, especially in its early minutes, that old pandemic sense of feeling entrapped while knowing there’s something bad outside. The family swings from the cozy idleness of having less responsibility to the real panic of wondering when it will end, if ever. The movie reminds us of what we know but may have forgotten, namely that these swings can happen quickly and throughout the same day.

But there’s a problem built into the movie’s design: No matter how vivid the actors might be, or how well thought out the family dynamic, it’s impossible for anything about the characters to be more interesting than the situation they find themselves in. Details about how the parents (Moura and Lee) and their kids are getting along are all well and good, but they can’t distract us from the two things we want to know — what’s going on, and how will they escape?

Those are the only things we want to know.

To distract us, the makers of “The Last House” attempt to reframe the movie as a tale of people struggling to survive, but the survival aspect is of only modest interest. Viewers, after all, know that it’s in the very nature of movies for the lead characters to survive, either until the end of the movie or close to it. In fact, when they don’t, it’s such a big deal that people still talk about it decades later (see “Psycho”).

So the filmmakers’ challenge is to hold the interest of viewers, while denying them the only information that they actually want. Such a strategy is almost guaranteed to be a losing battle, but the makers of “The Last House” give themselves even more to overcome by stretching out the beginning and then stretching out the middle.

As for the end, it’s something of a disappointment.

The problem isn’t the actors; they make “The Last House” bearable. The issue is that the filmmakers didn’t accept that a simple premise — people stuck inside a house — required a brisk solution. 

At 85 minutes, “The Last House” might have had a better chance.