Quietly Watching

  Netflix dropped the first trailer for The Last House this week, and the premise alone is the kind that lodges in your head and stays there: a family of four wakes up sealed inside their own home, unable to get out, while the entire world outside falls under the same mysterious lockdown. A day becomes three, then a week, then years. The film arrives August 7, and on paper it is a survival thriller. What makes it worth paying attention to now is the suspicion that the threat outside was never really the point. A Blockbuster Director Locks the Doors The first surprise is who made this. Louis Leterrier built his career on scale, on fast cars and magic heists and comic-book spectacle, with Fast X and the Now You See Me films and a Transporter or two behind him. The Last House is the opposite of all that. It is one house, one family, no exits. A director known for moving the camera through the biggest possible spaces has chosen to trap himself, and us, in the smallest one. That kind of...

  Let me be honest about what Apex is before I tell you why I watched all 95 minutes of it without looking at my phone. Apex is a survival thriller in which a woman is hunted through the Australian wilderness by a psychopathic stranger. The script, written by Jeremy Robbins, is not doing anything you haven't seen before. The villain's motivations are thin. The backstory is dispensed with quickly, almost impatiently, as though the film itself knows that nobody came here for character development. The plot moves in the direction you expect it to move, and it gets there without much surprise. And yet. Charlize Theron is in it. And that changes things. What the Film Is Actually About Sasha (Theron) is a grieving extreme sports enthusiast who travels to Australia's remote Wandarra National Park to scatter her husband's ashes after his death in a climbing accident. She meets Ben (Taron Egerton) at a gas station — friendly, slightly off, the kind of person you notice and then ...