Spoilers ahead for The Last House
Over the years, blockbuster movies seem to have moved on from warning us about the future and started teaching us how to live in it.
Netflix’s new sci-fi thriller The Last House begins with a simple nightmare. A family of four wake up to discover they cannot leave their home: the doors won’t open and windows won’t break. An endless, unnatural rain has sealed them, and apparently their neighbours, inside their homes. The electricity, water and food supplies they took entirely for granted suddenly have an expiry date.
What follows is part horror movie, part family drama and, rather unexpectedly, part sustainability tutorial.
At first, they do what most of us would do – they count the tins. There’s an early confidence that feels painfully familiar. The family still have food, running water and electricity and they’re in an American house stuffed with the accumulated resources of modern life.
Survival In Reality
The kids notice when the WiFi goes down. Soon the family are rationing and saving seeds from tomatoes. The mum tries to grow vegetables indoors. Eventually they rip up their own floorboards to reach the soil beneath the house and the American home slowly changes from a place in which resources are consumed into a tiny ecosystem in which resources have to be produced.
But the Delgado’s don’t suddenly become brilliant homesteaders, quite the opposite. They fail, again and again. Which is the point when a nicely thrilling romp of a movie becomes a masterclass in how environmental survival really works. The crops don’t magically spring from the ground because someone has watched a YouTube video about regenerative agriculture. They face problems with soil, fertiliser and light. Vegetables take infuriatingly long to grow when you’re hungry. The first home-grown tomato becomes precious enough to be a Christmas present.
This is a very different environmental story from the ones we’re used to seeing.
For decades, Hollywood’s great environmental contribution has been disaster. Flood the Statue of Liberty or freeze New York. Send the tornadoes, tidal waves, asteroids or aliens. Disaster and survival on grand scales.
The Last House gives us a story of claustrophobic competence.
Capturing and cleaning rainwater is a crucial plot point Even the children’s education continues, albeit with a different focus. At one point their father abandons conventional schoolwork and starts teaching them how to gut a fish, using stuffed toys as unfortunate stand-ins.
This isn’t survivalism in the macho bunker-and-guns sense. In fact, the gun they own turns out to be considerably less useful than seeds, engineering knowledge, patience and the ability to learn.
What’s Worth Living For
Then there’s the piano. As the years pass, the children start learning to play the dusty piano that had been neglected in their abundant lives. That tiny detail is one of this movie’s biggest lessons. Because resilience is often described as though humans are machines. Food + water + shelter = survival. But that isn’t how people work.
We need purpose, beauty and learning. Christmas presents remain a crucial ritual, even when the present is half an apple. Music matters even more when the lights have gone out.
That feels particularly relevant to our own climate-changed world. Resilience means communities capable of adapting without losing the things that make life worth adapting for.
And the environment isn’t the victim in this movie. At one point, looking at the changing world outside, Jason says that it is no longer humanity steering the ship. Elsewhere the family notice how quickly the stars become visible when planes, helicopters and pollution disappear. Humanity’s catastrophe is simultaneously nature’s recovery.
That tension between catastrophe for humanity and recovery for nature runs all the way to the ending. The final breakthrough comes through empathy rather than conquest. Without too many spoilers: an act of compassion towards nature changes the relationship between the family and world keeping them captive
The survival lesson turns out not to be that we must peace with nature rather than defeating it.
That moral might be why The Last House feels like part of an emerging kind of environmental storytelling. That survival depends not on escaping nature, but finally learning how to live with it.