No One Gets Out Alive Review (Film, 2021) #31DaysOfHorror
content warning: violence against women, blood, gore
Ambar, an undocumented immigrant living in the United States, moves into a boarding house in a new city. She was the full time caregiver of her ailing mother until her death and now has a chance at a fresh start. Everything starts to go wrong once she enters her new home. It’s like something doesn’t want her to leave no matter how hard she tries to get a better life.
No One Gets Out Alive is an adaptation of an Adam Nevill novel written by Jon Croker and Fernanda Coppel. There are a few choices made to add more layers to the narrative that better support the paranormal elements of the film. The original book features an unlucky woman stuck in a string of low-wage jobs trying to find a more secure footing in the world. The film resets the story in the United States and focuses on undocumented immigrants. The things Ambar discovers in her first two days in the boarding house would be enough to send anyone fleeing into the night if they had the choice; she doesn’t, and neither do the other women living in the building.
Things don’t add up straight away. The landlord, Red, demands an entire month’s rent in advance once he finds out Ambar is undocumented. His accounting of how many people live in the boarding house never seems to add up, and the few women we do meet all seem incredibly nervous to talk to anyone. There are strange noises everywhere that eventually come into focus as cries for help. Footprints appear on the ground with no one there to leave them. It’s a moody setup for a paranormal horror film.
The biggest issue with No One Gets Out Alive is being a bit too direct. The lead up to the second act blatantly spells out what is happening. Ambar explores the shared study of the living room, which features a collection of photographs, books, artifacts, and constantly playing audio recordings that detail a ritual to appease some kind of god or spirit. I won’t spoil it even though the film blatantly does. This is the kind of reveal that typically happens going into the third act of this kind of story onscreen. Think learning about Sadako or Samara in The Ring or the reveal of the psychic medium’s finding in decades of haunted house films.
The technical execution of the film is good. The special effects feel real and the sound design adds a lot of tension. Everything from the costumes to the makeup to the set dressing grounds the story in a believable way. It’s just paced a bit too much like a horror book to really soar onscreen.
Nevill’s voice as an author is present throughout the film. He is a modern master at this style of paranormal storytelling. His books feature great foreshadowing that twists further than you could imagine as the story progresses. The stories he writes feel like they are inevitable, not hopeless, and there is a difference.
In this style of literary horror, the structure can feel more like a spiral than a more traditional story arc. It feels like your spiraling down to the final scare with no way to slow the fall. This kind of horror pulls you along, dragging you around key details again and again until every aspect is explored and their true purpose is revealed. You’ll often find that there are intentional gaps in your knowledge because the author doesn’t want to distract you from the horror. You don’t get to breathe in these stories. Film simply reveals too much of the outside world for this narrative format to easily translate from the page.
The last act of No One Gets Out Alive works really well onscreen. It is incredibly tense and unpredictable without abandoning what you already learned about this world. The grand reveal is inherently cinematic, as the layers of the narrative thrown out so early in the runtime lock into their final forms. The story itself allows the world view to focus in on the most significant details to the horror and it’s terrifying.
Fans of paranormal and literary horror will find something to enjoy in No One Gets Out Alive.
No One Gets Out Alive is streaming on Netflix.
***