Flipping the home invasion thriller on its head, Netflix’s The Last House puts a family in peril when a mysterious threat seals them inside their home with no escape while torrential rains pour down — for days that turn into weeks, months and years. Louis Leterrier’s capable direction and reliably solid performances from Greta Lee and Wagner Moura as parents desperate to shield their kids from their worst fears make for a film that, despite its sci-fi and horror elements, is as much a psychological chamber drama and survival thriller about four people using their wits and dwindling resources to stay alive, even as their close-knit ties start fraying. 

Inevitably recalling the isolation of COVID lockdown, the screenplay by Matthew Robinson (Good Luck, Have Fun, Don’t Die) oscillates between finding comfort and terrified vulnerability in self-reliance, keeping the exact nature of the force imprisoning the family — and seemingly everyone else in the world — vague until roughly an hour in, when the suspense is turned up even as the storytelling gets wobbly. 

That wait might frustrate genre fans requiring a more instantaneous stream of high-intensity thrills and scares, or anyone expecting the kind of hard-charging action Leterrier is best known for (the first two Transporter films, Clash of the Titans, Fast X and the forthcoming Fast Forever), but the actors keep it watchable.

The quote from Arthur C. Clarke that opens the film is significant: “How inappropriate to call this planet Earth when it is clearly Ocean.” With global sea levels rising due to climate change, those words could ultimately turn out to be prophetic. The pervasive anxiety attached to such environmental issues contributes to the tensions eating away at the family as they struggle to figure out who or what is holding them captive and what that entity wants from them. 

For much of its running time, The Last House feels almost like a more grounded version of the taut 2023 Kaitlyn Dever sci-fi horror No One Will Save You, this time rooted in human response to an ambiguous, possibly alien threat. Right from Day One, when they are grasping for answers, Jason Delgado (Moura) tells his family that whatever force has left them housebound is not man-made. But like the audience, he is making conclusions based on minimal concrete knowledge.

An unemployed engineer, Jason packs up his fishing gear and heads home from the pier as a major storm front moves in, with no catch to show for his early morning efforts. A voiceover identified only at the end tells us: “The day the rains came, we learned we were not alone.” 

When Jason hustles his loving wife Ann (Lee), their 12-year-old son Graham (Noah Alexander Sosnowski) and 8-year-old daughter Ruth (Riley Chung) out to the car to go buy a Christmas tree, they find the doors and windows of the house sealed shut. Any attempt to force them open or even smash through them proves futile. Looking out their windows, the Delgados discover that their neighbors are in the same position, including a retired couple across the street who have limited food supplies.

At first, Jason and Ann encourage the kids to stick to a routine — household chores, study, piano practice, PE time — convinced the rain will soon stop and their lives will return to normal. With the Wi-Fi out along with TV and radio reception, entertainment options are limited to board games, Jason’s old vinyl collection (a sweet moment has the family cutting a rug to The Cure) and a choice of two films, Annie or Air Force One, to throw into an old DVD player.

They start rationing food, and Ann begins collecting tomato seeds and vegetable roots to start an indoor garden. One of the advantages of a house in disrepair and sinking into its foundations is easy access to soil by lifting a few floorboards. A crack in the chimney spurs Jason to rig a trap with which he goes “fishing,” catching squirrels and other wild animals that wander into the yard and end up in the frying pan. But this food source also brings a new danger into the house.

Somehow, the need to hide from whatever is outside becomes imperative, even more so when they catch their first partial glimpse of a towering creature, unrecognizable as any species known to man. 

Their confinement stretches on, jumping ahead five years, by which time the orderly suburban street has surrendered to overgrown nature. The children grow into teenagers, Graham (Gabriel Barbosa) becoming moodier and more impatient while Ruth (Emma Ho) retreats into her vivid imagination, reading about mermaids and mythological monsters like Krakens and Leviathans. She starts theorizing about undiscovered sea creatures living on the ocean floor. 

Things get hairier once the tentacled entities outside reveal themselves and the family is forced to fight them off. But the creature designs are clunky, dipping for inspiration into H.P. Lovecraft, kaiju, the rampaging river mutation in The Host and a whole mishmash of unmemorable sci-fi freaks. 

The more we see of them and the more their presence is explained, the more the film slips out of Leterrier’s grasp, cheapened by tired jump-scare tropes like corpses bobbing up in water or bodies infested with creepy-crawlies. 

We’ve seen too many more terrifying depictions of families pitted against outsize nonhumanoid aggressors — in the world of A Quiet Place, for one — to be especially transfixed by the faceoffs here, which are less effective than the elemental menace of rising floodwaters threatening to drown the Delgados in their own home. After such a protracted emotional build-up, the conclusion feels rushed, its interspecies-empathy message a bit trite.

The movie’s main strength is its emphasis on familial love as a sustaining force, nodding back to thrillers from the ‘80s. Ann and Jason might both appear to be cracking up under the strain, frightening their children — she becomes more fatalistic, while he is so consumed by his responsibility to keep them safe that he neglects his roles as husband and father — but the unbreakable bond holding them all together makes the stakes more real than Robinson’s script would indicate. 

Lee and Moura are gifted actors, especially compelling as the increasingly haggard Ann and Jason give up trying to mask their despair. And Graham and Ruth are superbly cast at both ages, creating an affecting portrait of family as a lifeline that keeps the audience in their corner even when the storytelling falters.

When the Locarno Film Festival unveiled the program for its 79th edition, it promised an “adventurous” lineup.

German filmmaker Nicolaas Schmidt’s debut feature film, September Afternoon, which will world premiere on Aug. 10 in the Filmmakers of the Present Competition of the Swiss festival, is perhaps the perfect case in point.

“If you don’t know anything about what’s to come, you are probably at risk of leaving the room,” Locarno’s artistic director Giona A. Nazzaro tells THR. “I’m aware of that, but if you stick with it, you will be completely surprised” and enjoy a cinematic journey you won’t forget any time soon. 

What he means is that, just like in Schmidt’s short- and medium-length films, there isn’t much traditional “action” or even dialogue in September Afternoon. “The film uses ‘dead time’ as raw material,” the filmmaker highlights in a director’s note. “I stretch mundane moments until they collapse in their emptiness — an invitation to the viewer. In an age of arbitrary extraordinariness, plain banality is stimulating as fuck.”

Schmidt, who was born in Leipzig and lives and works in Hamburg as a filmmaker, video and conceptual artist, tells THR that he is most interested in images, sounds, music and moods, putting a spotlight on the passage of time in everyday situations, repetition and silences.

Or, as Nazzaro offers: “Maybe the trivialities we see are exactly the things that we might be sorely missing in the future,” says Nazzaro, “because we will not have the time to get bored and tend to trivial matters. So for me, [Schmidt’s work] also brings with it a very political element – how to regain agency over the use of your time.”

But wait, what can we share about September Afternoon without spoiling too much? Well, the film shows a couple that refuses to accept that summer is over; instead ​, the small family is ​heading to the coast for ​a​​ last experience with sand and seawater. But they find themselves struggling with strong wind and the encroaching elements. With romantic expectations of the summer flipped on their head, Locarno teases that things unravel from there “into a disaster of a different magnitude,” underlining the filmmaker’s invitation to observe and be surprised.

Produced by Maxi Haslberger and Balthasar Busmann, September Afternoon features cinematography by Thomas Oswald. Schmidt directed and edited the movie based on his screenplay. The cast features Amin Motallebzadeh, Katharina Grossmann, Hedi Grossmann and Ada Kurzhöfer. Kino Rebelde is handling international sales.

September Afternoon is the second Schmidt film traveling to Locarno. His First Time [The Time for All but Sunset — Violet] premiered at the Swiss festival in 2021 and received a Pardi di Domani special mention.

On his website, the filmmaker describes himself as a “gréyalisateur,” ​emphasizing grey as a midpoint, average – or rather, relativity and ambivalence – ​and the French word for director, “réalisateur,” or someone who brings a film to life. He also calls himself a “dozing artist (concept, photo, video).” And his bio on the website highlights: “He started dreaming at the age of four after visiting the movie theater in his socialist small town south of Leipzig for the very first time” before the GDR and West Germany reunited.

Asked about the inspiration for his films, Schmidt tells THR: “It’s all based on ​experiences, ​observations or interpretations of observations.” In the case of September Afternoon, he recalls: “I experienced a similar situation that was as unrelaxed as can be. And I was ​sadly disappointed​ that I didn’t film or didn’t have a friend with a hand camera there to film.”

Does he have a detailed plan or script? “I think in detail about what ​exactly ​happens and what is said despite starting the process with wanting to leave things as open as possible,” including for the actors,” he says. “But sometimes things get too ​concrete​ and go beyond what really interests me, and then I pare back.”

The process of filming September Afternoon came with some surprises. “When we shot the film, it was late September and really stormy, which made things much harder than expected,” Schmidt explains. “I had originally planned to make the wind seem stronger than it was. ​But my experience so far has shown that it’s good for the films when some things turn out differently than anticipated. While that stresses me out immensely, getting through it together with others does me a world of good and provides me with longer-lasting stability.”

Music plays a key role in Schmidt’s films, even though he says he couldn’t compose any himself, and so do commercials. “​In the ’90s, there were commercials that were extremely elaborate and visually captivating, almost poetic, yet emotionally manipulative – that fascinated me, he shares. “I had an interest in them. And I think these are spots people recognize. In the case of September Afternoon, the commercial came late in the process. It is an element that adds ambiguity.”

Schmidt has also referenced other movies in his films, with his latest including a scene from Philippe Garrel’s Le Révélateur. How do these cinematic “quotes” find their way into his works? “I find these in the very long development processes,” he tells THR. “I bring together a bigger collection of ideas, thoughts and associations, saved in a wide chaotic note, and bring them into question and a rating and priority structure at some later point, at the latest when I name that work. When a feeling for the film arises then, it’s also less sober and dry than it sounds now.”

​​Late in September Afternoon, there is a scene using light in a specific way, and Schmidt made sure not to simply copy ​the very specific solutions of ​other directors​ “for no reason​​​.” He highlights: “I don’t want to repeat ​every​​​thing.” ​The effect used in the end was “common enough and, in all its simplicity, also effective enough,” the filmmaker explains.

Some may say not much happens over long passages of Schmidt’s films, but the creative doesn’t believe that movies need “action.” “That’s not my thing at all. That provokes me to the max,” he tells THR. “But it is a core problem that you must convince people that ​less, or ​nothing, happening can be​ okay or even ​​ ​fascinating and also that you don’t need dialogue.”

The same goes for uniform tastes and approaches. “I find it hard to handle uniformity,” Schmidt says. “It ​​unsettles​​ and ​frightens​ me if people subject themselves to ​trends, fashions and ​the whims of the masses,​ or individuals​. I understand that this view also excludes things, but I ​just don’t like any adaptation without questioning and a valid reason.”

That said, he doesn’t make films simply to provoke audiences, but out of curiosity and also to potentially discover a community of people outside the mainstream. “​For me, it’s a pretty reliable opportunity to find like-minded people,” Schmidt says. “And I appreciate it when people come up to me and give me the feeling that I am a bit normal.”