The first thing I’m going to tell you about Netflix’s The Last House is that animal lovers may want to skip this one.

The reasons for that should become clear in a few paragraphs. The Last House, which debuted on Netflix this past Friday, starts in on ordinary house in the Seattle area, on an ordinary day close to the Christmas holiday. Our cast is an ordinary family – mom Ann (Greta Lee), dad Jason (Wagner Moura), son Graham (Noah Alexander Sosnowski), and daughter Ruth (Riley Chung), who live with their dog (Cassidy, a golden retriever) in an ordinary house in an ordinary neighborhood.

Then something very out of the ordinary happens. There’s an intense rainstorm, but as these folks live in Seattle, they decide to go out to pick a Christmas tree anyway. But they find they can’t leave the house. The doors won’t open, nor will the windows. The glass in the windows can’t be shattered – if the panes start to crack, they immediately begin to seal themselves. The walls can’t be breached, and the phones and Wi-Fi are down. They still have power and water but are truly trapped inside their own home.

They look across the street to see their neighbors trapped as well. Through chalkboards and whiteboards, they manage to convey that as far as they know, everyone is trapped. One neighbor, out for a jog at the time all the houses were sealed, swears she will run for help and goes off beyond where she can be seen.

But no help comes. Ann and Jason try to keep cool for their kids’ sake, and turn the experience into a fun family adventure. They make snacks and watch movies and promise that they are all safe. Things will be ok!!

Time passes. And passes. Food supplies run low. The neighbors seem to be having the same problem. Ann’s countertop garden can only grow so much food; once it’s gone, it takes time to grow more. There’s little in the way of protein. And it’s constantly raining, giving Ann and Jason even more to worry about, as their house has a problem with its foundation. There are cracks in the basement and in the chimney.

The chimney crack turns out to be a blessing though, as little Ruth is able to shimmy up the chimney and pop the cover off. They can’t escape through the hole, but they have access to the wildlife that is thriving outdoors in the neighborhood now free from human interference. And Jason is an engineer who devises traps. (Thus the warning at the top of this review.)

More time passes. Hair grows long and greasy. The child actors age out of the story and are replaced by older actors (Gabriel Barbosa and Arden Cho.) The power finally gives out. Water is scarce, and Ann starts a farm by ripping up floorboards in the dining room. Family togetherness has long been replaced by antagonism and despair. It’s still raining, and there are mysterious THINGS outside the house, suggesting that even if they could leave, they wouldn’t last long out there.

This part of the movie starts to feel like it’s happening in real time. Their boredom is our boredom as we watch them squabble and complain. The question of why this is happening comes up a lot, but the answers are purely speculation until the very end when things start to become clear. The ending feels really contrived once we finally get to it.

The Last House, directed by Louis Leterrier from a screenplay by Matthew Robinson, isn’t a bad story, but it would probably be better as an episode on a sci-fi anthology show, like The Outer Limits or The Twilight Zone, especially given the gotcha twist ending. But spending nearly two hours trapped in the house with our miserable protagonists, though, is just a little too claustrophobic to be enjoyable.