Most of us aren’t truly ready for films that directly cover the recent horrors of Covid and, well, why would we be? There was a need back in 2021 for something strict and journalistic like Matthew Heineman’s excellent documentary The First Wave and there have been other variously illuminating docs since, but it’s been tough for narrative storytellers to address and confront – and even tougher for audiences to engage. It’s partly why Ari Aster’s intermittently excellent 2020-set satire Eddington fizzled at the box office, released five years after the pandemic began but still five years too soon.
The most effective ways in have usually been through the back door. Mike Leigh’s 2024 drama Hard Truths might have only mentioned the pandemic once and included just one mask but its portrait of a psychologically fractured, permanently on-edge woman, terrified of what lies outside her chillingly sterile house, was very much about the difficult after-effects of the disease. Next week sees the release of The End of Oak Street, an 80s-set fantasy adventure about a family trying to survive a prehistoric invasion from the safety of their own home and this week, sneaked out by Netflix just days before is The Last House, another high-concept genre tale that sees homes across the world locked off from the outside as something terrifying attacks.
