‘No One Gets Out Alive’ (2021) Review: Haunted Houses, Depictions of Immigration, and Living Nightmares
Santiago Menghini’s No One Gets Out Alive opens with sequences of footage from Mexico in 1963. A group of people dig a cave and find human skeletons suspended in the same position as when they died. Ominous music plays in the background, presenting the kind of horror Menghini will introduce in his feature debut. Moments later, the group digs up a stone box and things get a bit peculiar. Cut to the present day — a woman talks to a man on the phone and suddenly the electricity cuts off. She notices a box in the room across the hallway move closer and closer. Behind her, a figure with eyes that shine in the dark creeps up and grabs her from behind.
Menghini set his film in a boarding house for immigrants filled with secrets and traps for the people inside. This is where Ambar (Cristina Rodlo) is introduced to the audience. She arrives in Mexico illegally after taking care of her terminally ill mother for several years. She takes up work at a garment factory and rents the cheapest room available at a boarding house from Red (Marc Menchaca). Once Ambar moves in, she hears disturbing voices of people crying and rumbling noises in the basement, and experiences nightmares where she sees the stone box and hands crawling out of it. When another woman in the boarding house disappears without a trace, she wonders if there is something wrong. Unbeknownst to her, she is trapped inside the house and becomes an object for supernatural forces that lurk in the basement.
No One Gets Out Alive explores the reality of immigrants who want to make an honest living but get conned by people around them. Ambar desperately needs an ID but she has to pay a hefty amount for one and then lends it to her friend. However, Ambar’s friend disappears, so she finds herself in a hopeless situation, and when she gets fired from her job, she is left with no money for food and shelter.
The performance by Menchaca brings a suspenseful and scary aura, and Rodlo balances it with vulnerability and strength. Rodlo perfectly captures living as a struggling immigrant in an unknown country and dealing with her mother’s death with both sadness and hope that the circumstances she is in will get better. When she is ready to be sacrificed and killed by the supernatural evil force in the basement, Ambar has a dream where she’s in the hospital with her mother, but things are a bit different. She sees the stone box in the corner of the room and the atmosphere of the room is different. Rodlo’s emotional journey of portraying Ambar’s vulnerability and the pain of her mother’s death is an outstanding rendition.
The film’s boarding house is designed by Christopher Richmond, who wanted to create the house as an entity, a creature that comes alive at night and haunts the residents that live there. Menghini and Richmond worked together to design the house and found inspiration in David Fincher’s Panic Room and Mike Flanagan’s The Haunting of Hill House for their foreboding nature, suspense, aesthetic, and using the house as a character. It was important for Menghini and Richmond to create the boarding house as a character of its own, with creepy figures lurking in the dark and noises echoing from the basement. These elements helped to create an atmosphere in the house that felt threatening to Ambar and the other residents.
No One Gets Out Alive portrays the harsh realities of immigration and assimilating into a foreign country. Menghini’s experience as a Brazilian-Argentinian who emigrated to Canada was the reason why he took the opportunity to adapt the story. He is most connected to Ambar’s struggles of feeling alienated and wanting to belong to a place. It is a challenging narrative to explore given the political situation now, and adding the otherworldly forces into the movie gives it an interesting depiction of what the heroine faces.
Even though Menghini chose horror as a vehicle for his social commentary, the film still portrays the reality of immigrants’ struggles. Brilliantly captured with dark tones and a foreboding atmosphere, No One Gets Out Alive brings the evil nature of the house to life. The film’s peculiar and ominous storytelling progressed the narrative, resulting in an elevating movie that fights supernatural forces and living nightmares that become too real. Menghini’s No One Gets Out Alive explores the complex themes and realities of the struggles of immigration and assimilation. At the end of the film, Ambar realises that it is not just her who was taken advantage of in the boarding house. Many women who were looking for a future in the land of dreams succumbed to the evil in the basement. It speaks to the hardships that immigrants have to live through.
