It’s family survival week in a pair of punchy sci-fi thrillers, where death lurks just beyond the mailbox. “The Last House,” on Netflix, finds a Pacific Northwest family sealed inside their house due to mysterious forces at play. Over at the “End of Oak Street,” a big-screen undertaking with Spielberg-ian overtones, dinosaurs move into a tranquil suburb — call it Jurassic Estates. Both movies trap their main characters in a survival hell house, but one of them consigns viewers to audience purgatory and one does not.
“The Last House” undercuts its gifted cast through lazy execution. It seems meant to be a commentary on COVID-19, though Louis Leterrier’s lame mashup is vague about what exactly afflicts this suburban Seattle neighborhood. Rising stars Greta Lee (“Past Lives”) and Wagner Moura (Oscar-nominated in “The Secret Agent”) play a couple with an eight-year-old daughter (Riley Chung) and 12-year-old son (Noah Alexander Sosnowski) who all wake up one morning and can’t exit their house — the doors won’t open and if you smash a window, the glass magically reforms. Worse, there’s no Wi-Fi.
Jason (Moura), Ann (Lee) and the kids communicate with the neighbors across the way via whiteboards and Morse code. Food runs short but inexplicably Jason and Ann use their chimney to trap foxes, ferrets and bunnies. They also build an impromptu greenhouse in the living room. Life inside seems to be quite the familial bonding experience. Then we take a sudden multi-year leap forward. The family has outlived many of its neighbors, the kids are older (now played by Emma Ho and Gabriel Barbosa) and survival for the family has become a constant grind.
They don’t talk much about why and the director doesn’t give us much in the way of clues, either. When the reason finally becomes clear, it’s an implausible groaner. Lee and Moura couldn’t have had the last 30 pages of the script before they signed on, or they would have skipped it.
Life is just as grim for the Platt family, whom we meet in “The End of Oak Street.” Their suburb is near a city in a warmer clime and the time is the early 1980s (Joan Jett and no cellphones). The mother, Denise (a game Ann Hathaway) secretly writes a novel in the basement while dad Greg (Ewan McGregor) pretends to go to work each day, but he’s been laid off and delivers pizzas to make ends meet. Their dog Starbuck is a menace to the neighborhood yards, digging holes and leaving smelly deposits, until the guy next door (Mel Jacobs) tells Denise he’ll shoot the dog if it does not desist. Denise promptly informs him that if he so much as points a gun at their pooch, she’ll burn his house down.
One morning, the neighbor storms the Platts’ front stoop, points to a six-foot high pile of feces and blames the dog. When the implausibility of the pooch is noted, he blames the Platt’s kids, Audrey (Maisy Stella) and Brian (Christian Convery). It’s a funny bit, and somehow no one notices the thicket of ancient ferns and palms at the end of the street, or the feathered velociraptors snacking on feline pets.
When those first smaller dinos show up, you half expect some young ingenue to intone, “They’re here,” but there’s no slow build, as the Platt’s neighbors quickly become dino hors d’œuvres. The Platts try to flee in their car but one end of Oak Street has become a prehistoric pond and the other a precipitous Mesozoic mesa, pterodactyls included. They scurry back to the house, board up the windows and figure out their next move.
This movie also suffers from a poppycock rationale, but director David Robert Mitchell, who helmed the equally alluring “It Follows” (2014) and “Under the Silver Lake” (2019), orchestrates everything so well it binds you to your seat. “Oak Street” is by far the best dino actioner since Spielberg gave up the camera in the “Jurassic” franchise.
The other big reason “Oak Street” succeeds is Hathaway, who is in her fourth release of the year, after “The Odyssey”, “The Devil Wears Prada 2” (now streaming) and “Mother Mary,” with a fifth, “Verity,” on the way. In “Oak Street” her protective mom is more muted than Linda Hamilton in the “Terminator” films or Sigourney Weaver throughout the “Alien” franchise, but Hathway still anchors this movie. Stella and Convery give notable individual performances and McGregor is fine, but “Oak Street” runs on mom.
The one place “Last House” outdoes “Oak Street” is in the way it uses the flooded basement (another mutual feature of the two movies). But overall, “Oak Street’s” all-in performances, tight editing, top-shelf special effects and plot twists make for a much more desirable neighborhood.
“The Last House”
Streaming on Netflix
“The End of Oak Street”
Playing at Apple Cinemas Cambridge, AMC Assembly Row 12 and Kendall Square Cinema
A stronger
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