*Warning – contains spoilers for The Last House*
Netflix’s new sci-fi thriller The Last House, starring Greta Lee and Wagner Moura, follows the Delgado family, a seemingly regular family-of-four who find themselves held hostage in their home by an unknown entity.
For the Delgados, it’s a race for survival both physically and psychologically as they remain trapped in the house for longer than they had ever imagined.
However the main character of the film isn’t necessarily a member of the Delgado family, but rather the home they find themselves trapped in. Functioning as a home, shelter, prison and garden, the Delgados are confined to the one singular location – which was crucial for the storytelling of the film.
And bringing that to life was no easy feat. Unlike other productions, The Last House had a practical approach that consisted of building a fully functional house capable of withstanding the daily presence of an entire cast and crew and sustain immense water weight safely.
“It was the most difficult experience of my life,” director Louis Leterrier told Radio Times. “I’ve done giant movies, and I was like, ‘Oh, it’s gonna be easy.’ It was brutal because we built [the house]. This is not only a real house, but a reinforced house for what happens at the end. So we were inside – and I’ve said it before – but it felt like the longest housewarming party ever.”
A rarity in filmmaking, the movie was shot in chronological order, allowing for the house to visually degrade over time, meaning rooms were rebuilt over three phases to allow for “controlled destruction while maintaining continuity”, according to Netflix.
Leterrier continued: “So the first day, you’re like, ‘Hey, it’s cool.’ Second day, ‘Oh, yeah.’ And then you keep going. It’s never-ending. It becomes your private hell. Kevin Jenkins, our production designer and myself, we took time just to really design this house for the camera and for the story.
“So the staircase is at an interesting angle, but it makes sense for our story, and it was important for everything that happens to it. Like the communication, the size of the rooms, the evolution of the rooms, because the house had to evolve, and we worked in order, and we had to plan the last day before we shot even the first day. So we enhance but we couldn’t do major changes to everything that had been planned.”
When the movie has its time jump, audiences see that the Delgado family have done everything they can to survive, including growing vegetables from their floorboards and capturing wildlife animals with contraptions from their chimney.
“Everything is real from the animals to the rain to the plants inside,” Leterrier told Radio Times. “We grew real plants. The tomatoes that grew out of the floor of this house and the street was real, the rain, everything was real. We shot with big clunky 1980s cameras just to get that feeling. And it was a nightmare. Never do it. Dude, I’ll tell anybody, don’t do a movie inside a house!”
The first half of the movie was shot on 35mm film, with the second half transitioning to digital, something that Leterrier said he wanted to give a Steven Spielberg feel.
He explained: “We tracked the lenses, the spherical and also the anamorphic lenses, that they shot those movies with, the same cameras. And then the same lighting, we shot with tungsten lights and not LEDs. It was a callback to all those movies and now it’s much easier to make movies. Movies of that scope are easier to make now.
“But to do that was rewarding, but at the same time, the learning process [was] very interesting because the new generation of camera operators and loaders makes movies more practical to shoot now.”
Production designer Kevin Jenkins described working on the film as “a dance between realism and durability”, and every visual choice had its own practical repercussions.
“There were some extremely deliberate choices made that I cannot even begin to understand how they were able to execute,” Lee told Netflix. “What they accomplished was truly astounding because to create a realistic sense of aging is, I think, really hard, and it felt so essential to us as actors to really feel like the house had aged with us.”
Water played a central role in the film, with the Marine Department noted as collaborators “in bringing the film’s most challenging and visually striking sequences to life”.
As the house was designed to progressively flood as the story unfolds, Ian Creed (The Creator) worked closely with the production design and construction teams to create a system of large-scale water tanks that could accommodate the full scope of the set’s needs.
“It’s a community experience because you’re dirty, you get sick, the water stinks, it’s the worst,” Leterrier explained. “We put broccoli in it to make it dirty, everything smells like dirty dishes. It’s absolutely horrible.”
He added: “I wanted a storm. I wanted a hurricane inside this house. So we were throwing water. There were explosions. There was like all that stuff. You capture truth. The pain that you capture and the fear that you capture on your actors’ faces is very, very real. If you were to turn the camera on the crew, you’d get the same expression of pain and suffering.”
The Last House is available to watch on Netflix now. You can sign up to Netflix from £5.99 a month. Netflix is also available on Sky TV and Virgin Media.
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