ALL CAPS hindsight doesn’t make lockdown any less strange to revisit on screen — and yet Netflix has just slipped out a film that heads straight for that boxed-in dread.

According to a new report, The Last House is a high-concept sci-fi thriller led by Oscar nominee Wagner Moura and Greta Lee. The premise is brutally simple: a family is trapped inside their house as something sinister arrives, while homes across the world are locked off from the outside as something terrifying attacks.

It lands in an awkward cultural moment. The piece argues most of us still aren’t truly ready for films that directly cover the recent horrors of Covid — and, frankly, why would we be? Non-fiction has found cleaner ways through, with Matthew Heineman’s 2021 documentary The First Wave singled out as a strict, journalistic response, followed by other documentaries that have tackled the period in different ways.

Narrative fiction, though, has had a rougher ride. Ari Aster’s intermittently excellent, 2020-set satire Eddington is cited as an example of a film that fizzled at the box office — released five years after the pandemic began but, as the writer puts it, still feeling five years too soon.

So storytellers have been taking the side door: make it about aftermath, anxiety, and the terror of “outside”, without making it About Covid in big block capitals. Mike Leigh’s 2024 drama Hard Truths is highlighted for mentioning the pandemic only once and featuring just one mask, yet still painting a portrait of someone psychologically fractured and permanently on edge, frozen by what lies beyond her chillingly sterile home.

The Last House sits firmly in that lane, using genre to smuggle in a recognisable fear: the house as refuge, then prison; the world beyond the front door as threat; the everyday domestic space turned into a pressure cooker.

If straight pandemic drama is still too raw, this kind of apocalyptic lockdown thriller offers a safer handle — a “solid night in” that mirrors what so many people lived, without demanding a direct rewatch of it.