Greta Lee and Wagner Moura can’t leave

The 2018 double whammy success of A Quiet Place and Bird Box has ushered in a wave of “families at home but imperiled” movies. This year we have two prominent examples, The End of Oak Street, which is part of Anne Hathaway’s Big Year, and now we also have The Last House, starring Greta Lee and Wagner Moura. In both cases, families are at home but imperiled.

The trailer for Netflix’s next hopeful horror phenomenon The Last House dropped yesterday, and it is, at least, hiding whatever the “it” is. You know there is an “it”, something making the sci-fi premise happen, but The Last House is keeping mum. This in contrast to The End of Oak Street, the trailer for which entirely spoils the premise (dinosaurs vs. suburbanites, which frankly scans as if someone was mad that the Jurassic World trilogy never delivered on regular people fighting dinosaurs in domestic settings), though there’s always a chance it’s a secret Cloverfield movie. We can never rule that out with JJ Abrams.

In The Last House, Moura and Lee star as a couple who, along with their children, discover they cannot leave their house one day. (This scans as if someone looked around circa May 2020 and said, But what if we just NEVER LEFT again?) They have to figure out how to survive within the walls of their house, and then, eventually, The Premise kicks in. Maybe it’s aliens, maybe it’s the weather. Maybe it’s bears. (Maybe it’s the Annihilation nightmare bear?) The trailer isn’t giving every secret away.

Greta Lee stays busy, she also has Toy Story 5 out this month, and for Wagner Moura, The Last House is his first role since being nominated for an Oscar. It always happens, an actor gets their first nomination and immediately a genre flick comes out. It’s usually bad and clearly a paycheck project, and while I am not ruling out The Last House as a paycheck project, at least it doesn’t look terrible. It looks slightly better than Netflix’s average, and depending on how the film, which is directed by Louis Letterier, handles the spectacle and The Premise, it might end up better still. We only want the best for Greta Lee and Wagner Moura!