Sealed inside their own suburban home, a family finds every door and every window closed by something they cannot see. Beyond the glass, the rain never lets up, and figures are moving somewhere in the storm.
Those opening 20 minutes belong to The Last House, and they explain why Netflix subscribers turned it into the most-watched movie on the planet this week.
The reviews said one thing, the charts said another
Directed by Louis Leterrier, the 112-minute sci-fi thriller landed on Netflix last Friday, Aug. 7 carrying a 27% on Rotten Tomatoes. It climbed to No. 1 globally regardless. Starring Greta Lee and Wagner Moura, the film joins a very particular Netflix lineage: the movie critics tear apart that hundreds of millions of people press play on anyway.
The pattern is familiar. Bird Box drew mixed notices and still became a worldwide event, big enough to spawn a spinoff, even if Bird Box Barcelona never caught on the same way. War Machine earned a 66% earlier this year and went on to rank among Netflix’s biggest films of 2026. And 72 Hours, a comedy parked at 17%, shot to the top of the charts overnight.
This is where The Last House parts ways with that company. It’s a damn good movie.
Years in one house
Jason (Moura) and Ann Delgado (Lee) are a married couple shut inside their house along with their two children. Whatever has sealed them in isn’t confined to their address, either — it seems to have swept across the entire neighborhood.
There’s no way out and no explanation on offer, so the family survives on whatever was already indoors. Days become weeks, weeks become years, and as the supplies dwindle the Delgados begin dismantling their own home and rebuilding it into something capable of keeping them alive.
It’s a remarkably narrow canvas for the filmmaker behind The Incredible Hulk, Fast X and Now You See Me. Leterrier has said Matthew Robinson’s screenplay struck him differently than his usual material, because he’s a father and he recognized himself in a story about parents fighting to keep a family breathing.
“For the first time in my life, I was about to do something very personal, where I was seeing myself in it,” Leterrier said.
What the critics actually objected to
Work through the negative reviews and the shape of the complaint emerges quickly. The setup wins most of them over. So does the cast. The objections begin once the science fiction moves to the front.
Moura and Lee collect praise, as does the film’s portrait of a family adapting to years of isolation. Some reviewers, though, felt a contained premise couldn’t sustain a runtime pushing two hours. Others recoiled at the COVID lockdown echoes, which become difficult to overlook once the movie starts spelling itself out in the final act.
The complaint that recurs most: the creatures and the closing confrontation simply aren’t as gripping as four people puzzling out how to endure a sealed room. Claustrophobia was the strength. The answers weren’t.
The other read
We come down on the other side of it. Even as the circumstances around them tip into the fantastical, Leterrier keeps the Delgados framed at the center, and the family dynamic holds once the plot turns strange. This is the finest Steven Spielberg sci-fi thriller that Spielberg never made.
Whatever the verdict on that third act, Netflix viewers weren’t deterred. A 27% didn’t prevent The Last House from becoming the most-watched thing on Earth on a Friday night — which is a fair measure of what a Tomatometer number is worth once a film is parked on the home screen of a few hundred million subscribers.