I Watched Rekonek Last Night. Then Came The Last House: A Bizarre Coincidence and One Hell of a Movie Ride
Updated: Aug 30
Sometimes you start a movie expecting nothing more than a couple of hours of entertainment, and somehow you end up having an entire existential experience before the afternoon is even over.
That was my experience with The Last House.
What makes it even more amusing is that I had watched Rekonek the night before. So when I started The Last House, I immediately had this strange feeling of déjà vu.
I thought, Wait a minute… haven't I just watched something like this?
Obviously, the two movies aren't the same. But there was something about their underlying premise that felt familiar. Both deal, in their own ways, with ordinary people suddenly finding themselves in a world where the normal rules no longer seem to apply. There's isolation, uncertainty, family, survival, and this larger sense that something fundamental about the world has shifted.
The timing made the resemblance even more striking.
And I have to admit, Rekonek surprised me.
I'm not generally drawn to Filipino movies. That's not to say I think Filipino cinema is bad—far from it. There are genuinely excellent Filipino films. My frustration is that the movies that are readily available to a wider audience don't always represent what Filipino filmmakers are capable of. Too often, I find myself struggling with overly dramatic storytelling and painfully slow pacing. Sometimes the pacing feels like a waste of time, and the storytelling can feel as though it doesn't trust the intelligence of the viewer.
That's probably a harsh way of putting it, but it's honestly how I've felt.
So when I watched Rekonek and didn't have those complaints, I was pleasantly surprised. I remember thinking, Finally. They're learning. They're trusting the audience.
Then came The Last House.
At first, I was hooked.
There was mystery. There was suspense. There was humor. There were little nuances that kept me interested. I found myself thinking that although the two movies weren't necessarily similar in every respect, The Last House seemed to take some of those underlying ideas and execute them in a more layered and clever way.
And then the movie started changing on me.
Suddenly, there was a horror element. Then more horror. And I wasn't entirely sure how I felt about it. At one point, I realized there was something about this particular kind of horror that I couldn't quite wrap my head around. It wasn't simply that I was frightened. It was more that I wasn't sure what the movie was asking me to accept. The mystery and suspense had me engaged, but the horror was throwing me off.
Then came the scene with the dog.
That one hurt. The family's pet dog had to go, and it immediately brought back memories of my own. That scene stopped being just something happening to characters in a movie. It became personal.
And then, because apparently the movie hadn't done enough to torment me emotionally, the characters started running out of food. That's when my imagination became my own worst enemy.
I started thinking about all the unthinkable possibilities. The movie didn't even have to show me everything. It was enough to establish the circumstances and let my brain fill in the blanks. At that point, I seriously wondered whether I should continue watching.
But then I remembered something very important: I have a PAUSE button.😂 So I stopped. I took a breath. I gave myself some time. And eventually, I went back.
One thing I was very determined about, though, was that I did not want spoilers of any kind. I didn't want someone explaining what was going to happen or telling me how to interpret the movie. I wanted to experience it myself—even if that meant having to gather a little courage before pressing PLAY again.
And I'm so glad I did. Because eventually the movie reached the point where everything started to click.
The father came to his own realization about what the daughter had been trying to tell him all along, and suddenly I understood what the movie had been doing.
I actually sat there thinking: Oh. Wow! The movie had redeemed itself.
It was almost as though the film had looked directly at me and said: “You thought I didn't know what I was doing?”😂
And suddenly the horror didn't feel so out of place anymore. The strange things that had been bothering me began to make sense within the larger story. What initially felt confusing or disconnected started to feel intentional. The horror wasn't simply there to scare me. It was part of the language of the movie. That realization completely changed my reaction.
And it also changed my original comparison with Rekonek. The further I went into The Last House, the more I realized that the two movies really weren't that similar after all.
What I had initially recognized was more of a thematic connection—a shared interest in what happens when the ordinary world is disrupted. But The Last House ultimately takes those ideas into much stranger and more ambitious territory.
And then, naturally, my brain started doing what it does after a movie like this: Overthinking everything.😂
I started wondering whether there was another layer involving humanity versus nature. Whether the flooding and the reclaiming of space could be interpreted through the lens of environmental destruction or land reclamation. Whether the movie was playing with the idea of humans believing they can control or reshape nature, only for nature to remind us that we don't have as much control as we think.
But that's the thing. A movie that makes you start thinking about those questions after the credits is doing something right. What I particularly appreciated was how the movie made me revise my own interpretation. At first, I thought the horror was taking the movie somewhere I didn't particularly want to go. Then I became confused. Then I became frustrated. And finally, I understood.
The movie made me go through that process rather than simply handing me an explanation.
And perhaps that's why the ending felt so satisfying.
· I had earned the realization.
· I hadn't been spoiled.
· I hadn't been told what the creature meant or why the water was there or how everything connected.
· I had sat through the confusion, paused when I needed to, gathered myself, pressed play again, and eventually reached the other side.
So what started as:
“This reminds me of Rekonek.”
Became:
“I don't know if I can handle or make sense of this horror.”
Which became:
“Oh, they're starving—so you know what's next. My brain is thinking about the unthinkable.”
Which became:
“I'm a grown man. I'm finishing this movie.”
Which eventually became:
“OH MY GOD. I GET IT NOW.”😂
And the funniest part?
All of this happened on a Sunday afternoon. It wasn't even nighttime. Apparently, I didn't need the darkness of night to have a full-blown cinematic existential crisis.
I just needed
· a movie,
· a little curiosity,
· a pause button,
· and enough stubbornness to see it through.
Helluva movie night. At 3 PM.
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