Mark Reviews Movies: NO ONE GETS OUT ALIVE

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Review by Mark Dujsik | September 29, 2021

No One Gets Out Alive establishes an intriguing dynamic that plays on the title. On the one hand, there's an actual place, out of which one might want to get. It's a big, gloomy, and creepy house, located somewhere on the outskirts of Cleveland. You likely know the kind: in disrepair, filled with open spaces and lengthy halls, featuring a winding stairwell to and levels of landings on its multiple floors.

A prologue, featuring a random and never-again-seen woman, gives us a sense of exactly what we expect a story featuring this kind of house to do. In it, she's watching TV and on the phone. Then, the power goes out in the house.

Some credit is owed to director Santiago Menghini in this sequence, as the director doesn't try to hide or misdirect us from what's actually happening here. Down the hall from the woman, a stone box sits on the ground. On the floor, the camera notes footprints, and before we can really register where this hidden person or entity may have gone or may be, a ghostly figure, in semi-silhouette and with glowing eyes, appears.

It's standing right behind the woman, in one of those jump-scares that's actually effective. Menghini only alludes to something sinister in the setup, without beating us over the head with fake-outs, rising music, or other trickery. It's all a matter of geography, atmosphere, and timing.

Anyway, that's one mode of this story, adapted from Adam Nevill's novel by screenwriters Jon Croker and Fernanda Coppel, and as some eerie punctuation to the other tale this movie is telling, it's mostly—and for a while—effective. The reason it works, though, isn't just in Menghini's methods. It's also in that this house provides no solace or rest for the main character, whose life outside of the place feels like on without a chance for escape.

She's Ambar (Cristina Rodlo), an undocumented immigrant who came to the United States with her mother, had dreams of going to college, and had to put them on hold when her mother became ill. Now, without a college degree or official paperwork, she works in a sweatshop, lives out of a motel, and hopes that some forged documents might give a chance to go to night school—as soon as she can pay for all of that, that is.

While at work, Ambar notices a flyer announcing a room for rent, and obviously, that room is the same house from the prologue, standing on an ordinary street but exuding plenty of menace in the night. The landlord, named Red (Marc Menchaca), wants a month's rent in advance, so there goes her notion of getting that counterfeit paperwork anytime soon.

For a good chunk, the movie goes back and forth between this everyday, miserable struggle for Ambar—trying to hold on to some cash, her terrible job, and her hope that things might get better one day—and all of the supernatural things happening in the house. They don't necessarily complement each other in any specific way, except that Ambar starts dreaming of and seeing visions of her dead mother while she tries to sleep, but they do kind of ground each other thematically.

The stuff at night in the house is worse, because we know how terrible things are for Ambar in the day, which becomes even more of a misery because there's no real home for her to go. There's no rest for the wicked, as the ghosts and Red's nocturnal hulk of a brother Becker (David Figlioli) prove. That means there's no rest for a good person, just trying to get by and get over and get to the next step of life, either. No one gets out alive of this house or, for that matter, the very real circumstances of Ambar's situation.

For a while, the movie works fairly well with this dichotomy. Ambar's life keeps collapsing, as promises and opportunities disappear. Back at the house, Menghini escalates the mystery and the presence of the ghosts, climaxing in a particularly clever scene in which Ambar follows the invisible but destructive trail of two spirits, as they re-live an argument and fight from another time.

One housemate unexpectedly leaves. New ones arrive. Red seems to be hiding something in the basement and his study (We have to laugh when an ancient, ritualistic sword established in the first act is finally used in the third), and Becker stalks around the house, mumbling an incantation and leaving trails of some gunk. All of it is pointing toward some mysterious mythology of old.

The movie may never find a significant reason to juxtapose Ambar's life with the odd occurrences in the house, but it eventually gives up entirely on the former. The third act of No One Gets Out Alive certainly raises the real-world menace and otherworldly stakes, with a lot of violence and an unconvincing computer-generated monster, and in the process, the movie gives up the main element of the story that made it different from all that usual stuff.

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