'' THE LAST HOUSE '' : REVIEW SNIPPET

STREAMING : A House Divided. '' The Last House juggles alien invasion, family drama and survival horror, but takes far too long to make any of them compelling. "

FOR a simple straightforward movie, The Last House is surprisingly confused about what it wants to be.

Is it an alien invasion thriller ? A survival story ? A family drama where most of the runtime is taken up by perfunctory decisions that work only for the time being, while the crucial choices - the ones leading to actual revelations and the high points of the story - are held back for the climax?

Here's a hint : it is all of the above, with a heavy emphasis on the last part.

The director is Louis Leterrier - The Transporter, The Incredible Hulk [the Edward Norton one], Now You See Me, Clash of the Titans and Fast Furious 10.

The writer is Matthew Robinson - Love and Monsters and Dora and the Lost City of Gold. The producer is Peter Chernin - Oblivion, all recent Planet of the Apes films, Ford v Ferrari.

The cast includes Greta Lee, of the Oscar-nominated film Past Lives and Tron : Ares, and Wagner Moura of Narcos and the Oscar-nominated The Secret Agent, alongside two pairs of actors playing their on-screen children : Riley Chung and Emma Ho as the daughter, and Noah Alexander Sosnowski and Gabriel Barbosa as the son.

There is a reason for casting two sets of child actors.

The story goes like this : a family gets trapped inside their home, which has been mysteriously sealed by an impenetrable force field that weakens only when rain falls and the creatures outside attack.

Despite dwindling rations and eventual power and gas cut-offs - the phone lines and internet went down immediately after the invasion - the family somehow survives for seven years, before finally growing desperate enough to fight back.

!WOW! thanks Mohammad Kamran Jawaid.