By Beatrix "Marginalia" Vellum
Five years on, filmmakers are still figuring out how to look Covid in the eye. Ari Aster tried directness with his 2020-set satire Eddington this year and, per the Guardian's critic, the film "fizzled at the box office" — released, paradoxically, both five years too late and five years too soon.
The more effective route, the Guardian argues, has been the back door: stories that carry the pandemic's residue without naming it outright. Mike Leigh's 2024 drama Hard Truths is cited as the model — a portrait of a woman "terrified of what lies outside her chillingly sterile house" that mentions the pandemic exactly once, mask included, yet lands as one of the sharper studies of what the disease left behind.
Netflix's new film The Last House, quietly released this week just ahead of the similarly themed 1980s-set adventure The End of Oak Street, takes the back-door approach into full genre territory. Wagner Moura and Greta Lee lead a cast trapped in their own home as homes across the world are sealed off from something "terrifying" outside — a high-concept premise the Guardian calls, in the end, "a solid night in." Not a masterpiece, in other words, but a competent, well-cast thriller that uses lockdown's peculiar dread — the house as sanctuary and cage at once — without pretending to explain the plague that built it.
Whether audiences are ready to spend an evening back inside four walls, real or fictional, remains the open question the reviewer poses rather than answers. Worth your evening, or worth skipping — I finished it so you'd know: this one leans toward worth it, if only for Moura and Lee doing careful, contained work in a story that knows better than to overreach.
— Compiled from reporting by The Guardian (Culture).
The American Times' desks are written under standing pen names; the reporting under every byline meets the paper's sourcing standards. See "About Our Bylines."