Where to Watch The Last Thing He Wanted and What You Should Actually Expect
The Last Thing He Wanted is a 2020 political drama directed by Dee Rees, based on Joan Didion's 2013 novel. Anne Hathaway plays a news journalist whose professional and personal life collapses when she takes an assignment that forces her to confront her own family's complicated legacy. Ben Affleck plays her estranged husband, and Diego Luna appears as a diplomat tied to the geopolitical subplot. If you are looking for it right now, it is available to stream on Netflix in most regions, though availability shifts depending on your country's licensing deals. You can also rent or buy it digitally through Apple TV, Amazon Prime Video, Google Play, and Vudu at around $3.99 to $4.99 per rental or purchase. There is no legitimate free download option that is worth using, and anything claiming to offer a free torrent or stream is either malware, a phishing setup, or legally risky.
The Last Thing He Wanted and Why It Got Panned
The film premiered at Sundance in January 2020 and received brutal reviews from critics. It holds a 13% rating on Rotten Tomatoes and a 29 out of 100 on Metacritic. The screenplay, which Rees adapted herself from Didion's book, was widely criticized for being muddled and uneven. Jonathan Romney at Variety called it a "confused and muddled affair," and Peter Bradshaw at The Guardian gave it one star. The main issue is structural. The novel exists in multiple narrative layers — the protagonist is writing a memoir, a fictional manuscript, and a news report simultaneously — and compressing that into a two-hour film meant cutting crucial connective tissue. What survives on the page often feels arbitrary on screen. Scenes pivot on information we are never given, which makes character decisions look instead of psychologically grounded. That said, the film is not universally worthless. Dooley also noted that Rees brings genuine visual sensibility to certain sequences, and some of the film's quieter moments work when they focus narrowly on Hathaway's character rather than the sprawling political machinery around her.
Performance Breakdown
Anne Hathaway gives the kind of committed, visibly exhausted performance that suggests she took the material more seriously than the script deserved. She carries most of the emotional weight, and there are moments where her portrayal of a woman caught between duty, ambition, and personal fracture actually lands. It is not a showcase role in the traditional sense, but she makes reasonable use of what she has. Ben Affleck is largely underused. His character exists primarily to create tension in the second act, and the film does not give him enough room to justify his presence beyond that. Diego Luna gets slightly more to do, particularly in the Central American political threads, but those subplots themselves feel loosely connected to the main story.
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Should You Watch It?
If you are a Joan Didion fan who wants to see how her work translates to screen, it is worth a single viewing. The production design, costume work, and general period atmosphere are faithful to the early 1990s setting. If you are looking for a tight political thriller, skip it and watch something like All the President's Men or The Firm instead. Those films understand cause and effect much better. The runtime is approximately 1 hour 51 minutes. This is not long enough to fully develop its ideas but long enough to feel dragging in places, especially in the third act where the political intrigue collides with the personal drama in a way that resolves several plot threads through exposition dumps rather than earned storytelling.
Technical Details for Streaming
The film was shot in a standard widescreen aspect ratio suitable for modern displays. Streaming quality on Netflix depends on your connection and subscription tier — the base plan typically streams at 720p or 1080p, while the Premium tier may offer higher resolutions where available. Audio is standard Dolby Digital or Dolby Atmos depending on your region and device support. Subtitles are available in multiple languages on Netflix. If you are watching with closed captions, enable them in your playback settings. The dialogue can be difficult to follow in certain scenes due to overlapping speech and ambient noise, which is a common issue with films of this type and a known weakness in the mix.
The Novel vs. The Film
Didion's source material is dense with unreliable narration and deliberate ambiguity. The book is not meant to be fully resolved. The film, unfortunately, tried to resolve things and ended up resolving them poorly. Readers of the novel will likely find the adaptation frustrating because it strips away the narrative techniques that make the original interesting and replaces them with conventional dramatic beats that feel unearned. If you have not read the book, read it first. It will help you understand what the film is trying to do, even if it cannot help you forgive how it does it. The film functions better as a companion piece than as a standalone experience.
