"No One Gets Out Alive" REVIEW

Why don't they just leave the evil house?

Why don't they just call the cops?

For as long as I can remember, these questions were tossed around like the ultimate gotcha for horror movies. They weren't treated like genuine questions; it was like the asker was firing his proton torpedoes down the exhaust shaft of the story. Why don't they call the cops? Boom. Story destroyed.

These questions assume that everyone can call the police, and they have options of places to go if they get out of the house.

No One Gets Out Alive does not start from that assumption.

Ambar is in Cleveland, Ohio, but she wasn't born there. She claims to have been born in Texas, but that's not true either. She works a job that only pays cash, and she knows how to slip away when people ask for ID. With enough money, maybe she can claw her way out of poverty--that's the American dream, isn't it?--but she needs to stay out of trouble until she gets that money.

So when she finds a room to rent that accepts cash without an ID, she takes it. And when strange things happen all around her, what good choices does she have? Is it weird that so much of her new home is locked and off-limits? Obviously. But again, where else can she go?

Sequences in the middle of the film depict Ambar walking through Cleveland in the winter, the screen full of concrete and dusted with snow. It's a desolate, hopeless image, evocative of the American conception of Soviet Russia. Women gather around factories, competing with each other for jobs where they will be underpaid because those jobs are better than no jobs. They can be fired on a whim because their bosses know that they can always find another worker.

These images would be hopeless except that they're punctuated with a promise: if Ambar can just hold out a little longer, she can game the system and then everything will be okay.

No One Gets Out Alive belongs in the emerging genre of horror movies that pair explicit social commentary with supernatural thrills, and it's become something of a cliche with these movies to say that, "In the final evaluation, the supernatural element isn't nearly so scary as the human cruelty." I find that a reductive view that ignores the role metaphor plays in these stories. The horror element amplifies and embodies the social commentary. They are cooperative, not competing, elements of the story.

Early in the film, a ghost appears over the shoulder of a woman, predatory and spooky. Later, the film will use the same technique to depict a cop who has the potential to deport Ambar. As an audience, we are intended to understand this similarity. It's a clever pairing of images that helps to connect what the movie is about to what the movie is really about.

And yet, it wouldn't be fair to pretend that No One Gets Out Alive is a perfect movie. While much of the movie feels fresh and imaginative, there are sequences that feel like they could have been lifted from any number of similar horror movies, where actions aren't particularly justified by the established characters. For instance, we know that Ambar has learned to survive by maintaining a low profile, and yet she pointlessly trespasses when she has no particular opportunity to use that to her own benefit. That feels less like a justified character decision and more like a decision that a writer made because the film lacked in tension in the early acts.

However, as Santiago Menghini's feature-length directorial debut, No One Gets Out Alive manages to be engaging and frightening, and it offers a fresh take on established tropes within the horror genre. Will the movie work for everyone? No. Does the ending build off the rest of the movie in a satisfying way? Up to you to decide.

However, of Netflix's horror offerings this year, No One Gets Out Alive is among the best. It's not as fun as Fear Street, but it's much more mature than Nightbooks, and it's definitely more worthwhile than Prey.

"No One Gets Out Alive" is available via Netflix.