Film Microreview: The Last House

Coronavirus allegories are needed in film, but this is the wrong allegory

At the start of this decade, when mass quarantine briefly reduced the footprint of human activity on the world, the meme “Nature is healing” achieved viral popularity. In the new Netflix movie The Last House, the premise seems to be: “Nature is healing… BUT AT WHAT COST?”

It all starts when the creatures of the sea revolt against humanity’s predation (there are a lot of references to dead fish in this movie) and weaponize the water cycle to produce a special type of water that seals houses hermetically. Their revenge comes in the form of a continuous rain that coats houses in a self-reparing layer, keeping people locked inside. The plot of the movie follows a suburban family (whose hobbies and interests are a bit too obviously gender-coded) as they find themselves forced to work together, contributing their respective talents, so they can survive with the food they have until they figure out how to force their front door open.

The movie is sharply divided in two parts: at the beginning, this family deals with their situation with a light-hearted attitude—at times too light-hearted, as if it wanted to be a comedy. The second part abruptly becomes survival horror when the neighbors start dying of starvation and it’s revealed that there are big, scary creatures lurking in the rain, and they can unlock the doors whenever they want.

Movies about the collective trauma of the coronavirus pandemic were to be expected, but it’s strange that they have been so few. In The Last House, an even bigger strangeness is that, while it’s unafraid to explore directly the psychological toil of a worldwide crisis that forced us to stay apart from each other, the movie’s attention is aimed at the isolation, not at the underlying crisis. Translating the allegory back into real life, it seems to be saying that the real disaster wasn’t so much the widespread infection as the quarantine, that the generation-defining scar we’ll carry forever isn’t the count of possibly tens of millions of deaths, but rather, having had to stay indoors for some months. This is a movie that wants to say something about a tragedy but prefers to focus on a related inconvenience.

This attitude is noticeable in the way the parents try to keep the kids occupied during the first weeks of isolation. Helpfully for the scope of the plot, phone and internet service is lost immediately, but somehow electricity, water and gas keep functioning for far longer. This family happens to own just two DVDs that they rewatch a sickening number of times: Annie and Air Force One, a melodrama about finding a home for a child and a hyper-patriotic thriller structured like a home invasion movie. Such choice of allusions reveals The Last House’s conservative stance: the priority is to safeguard a home for the kids, and prolonged separation denies them a proper childhood. This echoes the real-life argument that mandatory quarantine was an invasion of personal freedom. Nevermind that, in the world of The Last House, the weird rain has also conjured tentacled horrors that kill anyone who makes it outside. The movie heavily implies that Homo sapiens is to blame for the suffering of sea creatures, but our heroes’ response in the end is to wield those big brains and opposable thumbs to hunt and kill sea creatures.

So the elements for a story that comments on the early 2020s are there: people can’t leave their houses, the outside world has a mysterious deadly enemy, and the feeling of powerlessness is stressful for everyone. But it has its commentary backwards: in real life, being confined indoors was a solution, not the problem. The problem was that the virus made physical socialization dangerous, and isolation was what we decided to do to protect each other. In the movie, isolation is treated as the problem, an excessive punishment on humankind imposed by monsters, and protecting each other means finding a way to break the forced isolation.

The Last House works better when it feels small, when it cares about the value of mutual care and the cumulative weight of uncertainty. But it mutates into a power fantasy for doomsday preppers, with confusing editing and quick flashing lights during action scenes that detract from the emotional content. And again, it mistakes the nature of the crisis it’s trying to talk about. This is not the right way to contribute to collective catharsis. This is a reassuring pat on the back for those who whined that quarantine was an unacceptable affront that needed to be opposed with violence.

Nerd Coefficient: 3/10.

POSTED BY: Arturo Serrano, multiclass Trekkie/Whovian/Moonie/Miraculer, accumulating experience points for still more obsessions.

Film Review: Hoppers

Totally not like Avatar. It’s both more and less than that

The core conflict of Hoppers is fairly standard kid movie drama: protecting a piece of nature before a heartless urbanizer paves over it. What’s not so standard is the movie’s gimmick: a new mind transfer technology that lets humans pilot animal-shaped robot bodies to communicate with real animals. This invention could be used to convince the local fauna to retake the landscape they’ve been pushed out of. As soon as the protagonist learns about this machine, she makes the inevitable connection to the Avatar franchise. The inventor of this technology protests that there’s no resemblance to Avatar, but by that point in the conversation, the viewer is already primed to think of that connection and read Hoppers in the context of what Avatar has tried (and failed) to say.

To recap: in the setting of Avatar, humans have found an exomoon rich in resources that Earth wants, but there’s also intelligent life for whose culture those resources carry sacred significance. Humans invent a technology that lets them inhabit native-looking bodies so they can infiltrate the local society and persuade it to trade. As early as the first movie, humans realize that the natives don’t want anything from Earth and aren’t willing to give up their sacred spaces. So humans opt for war. One human defects and starts fighting on the side of the natives against Earth forces. Rinse and repeat for the next two movies.

The first major difference that can be noticed between Avatar and Hoppers is that in the case of Hoppers the human who infiltrates animal society is already on the animals’ side, which somewhat moots the point the movie is trying to make about the need to put oneself in the position of the threatened party in order to have empathy for their suffering. Our girl Mabel is introduced as a passionate believer in animal liberation since childhood, frustrated with people’s indifference and personally attached to a pristine glade near her grandmother’s house, through which a highway is now being planned. Mabel doesn’t need to be convinced of the importance of protecting the glade, which probably makes her the wrong character to put in a beaver’s body to talk to the other animals and experience life from their perspective.

The second major difference has to do with the type of rights in dispute. Avatar pits two civilizations against each other, which we’re meant to view as having equal worth and capacity for agency; but Hoppers tells a conflict between humans and animals, and those tend to be resolved by purely human decisions. For all the discussion that has emerged about the rights of nature (see here, here, here, here, here, here, here and here), so far it’s been human activists which push for their recognition, and human tribunals which agree to enshrine them. Avatar points in a different direction, with the pantheistic figure of Eywa taking her own initiative to defend Pandora. However, Eywa is still an impersonal force whose will is hard to discern. Hoppers goes much further. In Hoppers, the animals behave as persons with intentions and agendas of their own. When Mabel walked into the forest under the guise of a beaver, she was hoping to inspire the animals to reoccupy the glade; she wasn’t prepared for a wrathful declaration of retaliatory war.

Which brings us to the third major difference between Avatar and Hoppers: the ethics of the use of force on the resisters’ side. Whereas Avatar views the conflict between Earth and Pandora as a simple matter of who has the bigger guns, Hoppers seems to want to question the practicality of responding to aggression with more aggression, favoring empathetic discussion and teamwork instead. And in general, I favor that approach, because self-reinforcing spirals of violence are very hard to deescalate, but the movie’s moral stance is not kept consistent through the whole plot, because the leader of the animal resistance (a) can’t be reasoned with and (b) ends up being eaten by another animal without consequence. If the movie’s allegory of settler colonialism and the struggle of displaced communities was already strained by the use of animal characters, the way the story ends breaks any useful parallels that could be drawn. You can’t have your antispeciesist cake and eat it too: if you’re going to treat your animal characters as having human-level intelligence and dignity, you can’t just condemn them for the methods of their resistance while dismissing their casual predation as a joke.

Hoppers has its heart in the right place, but the mechanics of its plot are based on a flawed assumption that it never questions: that true empathy requires inhabiting the same body and seeing through the same eyes. Science fiction has already addressed that viewpoint. In the Babylon 5 season 2 episode “Confessions and Lamentations,” a deadly plague threatens the Markab aliens, who are confined to a sealed chamber while a cure is researched. The Minbari ambassador Delenn chooses to join the Markab in their quarantine, which prompts the station commander to chastise her because she’s not a Markab herself. To this she gives the brilliant reply, “I didn't know that similarity was required for the exercise of compassion.”

Right now Pixar is dealing with bigger problems than a confused plot. But perhaps Hoppers is a symptom: it points to a creative team that can’t commit to being too confrontational or too radical or too unyielding. They’re still making pretty-looking movies (although, by past Pixar standards, Hoppers doesn’t show us anything spectacular on that front), but they need to make up their minds about what they want their movies to say.

Nerd Coefficient: 6/10.

POSTED BY: Arturo Serrano, multiclass Trekkie/Whovian/Moonie/Miraculer, accumulating experience points for still more obsessions.

Book Review: ECO 24 edited by Marissa Van Uden

A speculative fiction anthology devoted to ecological fiction.

Whether you call it ecofiction, cli-fi, climate fiction or any other of a number of terms, ecological fiction is something that, as editor Marissa Van Uden points out, a type of story that humanity has been told for as long as we’ve been telling stories. From the Bible’s story of the flood, to the Sumerian myth of Utnapishtim, we’ve had stories of flood. The story of Persephone, Hades and Demeter has Demeter make the earth barren in anger and sorry for her lost daughter. While ecological fiction may not have had a name until the 1970’s, these stories have carried from human’s beginnings to Watership Down, to Daphne du Maurier (adapted into the film by Alfred Hitchhock), to Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring, and to Kim Stanley Robinson and other contemporary authors.

Marissa Van Uden brings a selection of ecological fiction stories to her anthology, ECO24: The Year's Best Speculative Ecofiction from Violet Lichen Press. All of the stories are reprints and represent what are, to Van Uden, the best of the field. Van Uden’s interest in ecological fiction and nature are formative in what made her an editor in the first place, and so that passion comes through in her editorial role in the selection of the stories. Since Violet Lichen is a small press (and sister press to the better known Apex), there is a real handcrafted feel to Van Uden’s curation. Also, the mission of Violet Lichen press, as they describe themselves is, “Inspired by the mysterious beauty of lichens growing in shadowy woods and the surreal drama of violet shades in nature, Violet Lichen fully embraces the weird, strange, and uncanny. It aims to leave readers feeling a little changed and disquieted, as if they have just emerged from under a strange spell.”

So when you combine ecological fiction with a small press sensibility and pair that with the weird, strange and uncanny, what Van Uden clearly is aiming for is a selection of stories that are ecological fiction, yes, but also all different, odd, unusual and strange. That’s a rather tall order. I know that ecological fiction has been having a moment as our own world’s environment continues to careen and become more unpredictable. However, I wondered, as I was reading the introduction to the book, whether or not there were enough stories to fill such a collection. It emerges that the editor’s plan is to do this sort of volume, yearly. And that, yes, even in a niche like this, there is a wealth of material to be found, curated and selected from.

In reviewing an anthology, particularly with a remit as unique as this one, I like to pay attention to not only what stories the editor has chosen, but particularly the first and last stories, since they open and anchor the collection.

For the opening, we have "In the Field" by Shelly Jones, originally published in The Future Fire. It is a potent, painful story of a researcher helping a very aging professor, a professor who hasn’t quite realized just how badly the world has changed after disaster. It’s a story of memory, and loss, and is poignant. The fact that the researcher is a droid, and the professor is truly alone of human company adds an extra dimension. I didn’t find this story strange and weird so much as somber.

But then that is a theme that goes throughout a number of stories of this collection. "The Water Runner" by Eugen Bacon is a world where the seas have dried up, and there is an almost mystical escape place, New Dodoma. Everyone, including our protagonists, want to get there, but it feels like a mirage, a delusion or a dream. Later in the collection, "Pig House" by Kay Vandal is a story where powered rebreathers are the only way to survive in a poisoned world. And a cross country trip to see what may be the last pig on Earth proves deadly. "The Plasticity of Being" by Renan Bernado is a story where a number of people are engineered in order to be able to eat plastic. It’s a story of exploitation of the poor by the rich, and by corporations, and how much the social cost of late state capitalist really is.

There are stories which are not so downbeat and lack an aura of doom. "Batter and Pearl" by Steph Kwiatkowski is a lovely little story of a really strange and weird world, where harvesting pearls of plastic in the ocean is a way to make a living. There is also a sense of “looking for the big score” to the story, which was totally unexpected and delightful. There is a strange darkness and verve to Jennifer Hudak’s "The Colonists". I could totally see this story in the light of 1950’s science fiction in terms of its theme and plot, but Hudak gives a very modern and literary feel to the story.

"Swarm X1048 - Ethological Field Report: Canis Lupus Familiaris", “6”" by F.E. Choe may be my favorite story. It is a moving story about alien xenobiologists studying the life and story of a dog. While many of the stories in the collection were moving, I was particularly touched by 6’s story and how 6 impacted the researchers who studied him. While many of the stories in this collection touched me, this one particularly resonated with me.

As far as the last story in the collection, we have "Mangrove Daughter" by E.M. Linden. This story to round out the collection has a second person point of view, and a strong sense of place, a slowly spreading grove of mangroves. Like the mangroves themselves are an inhabitant of a liminal space, between ocean and land, this story is a liminal one, using its point of view, and the theme of transformation into liminal space, particularly, to achieve that.

And aside those, there are many interesting and weird stories to read and enjoy. Not all of them are hits for me, even given the narrow and specialized remit of the anthology, the stories vary widely, even more than what I have described in the few I have talked about here. I think that the collection is a strong offering from Violet Lichen that helps showcase what the press and its mission is all about.

In the end, the editor’s hand in choosing and arranging these stories for maximum impact is noted and appreciated. ECO24 is, in essence, a collection that is more than the sum of its parts.

 
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The Math

Highlights:

• Strong editorial hand from the editor
• Interesting and diverse set of stories
• Weird, unusual and strange, just as it said on the tin.

Reference: Van Uden, Marissa, ECO24: The Year's Best Speculative Ecofiction, (Violet Lichen Press, 2025)

POSTED BY: Paul Weimer. Ubiquitous in Shadow, but I'm just this guy, you know? @princejvstin.