No One Gets Out Alive: Things Are Not What They Seem

The phrase “but it turns out that things are not what they seem” gets used so much in synopses for horror movies that I sometimes suspect whoever writes those things just has a document full of phrases - that included - from which they just copy and paste when summarizing a movie. It’s right up there with “but then their dream house turns into a nightmare” and “what began as a game becomes terrifyingly real.” It’s really difficult to muster a lot of enthusiasm for a movie whose description makes it sounds like fifteen other movies.

Luckily, No One Gets Out Alive, a movie that is both not what it seems and is about a situation where things aren’t what they seem is better than the generic title would lead you to believe, though it isn’t quite as good as it could be.

It opens with scratchy, grainy film footage of what appears to be an expedition to Central or South America. No dialogue, not a lot of exposition, just a trip into the jungle, and the retrieval of an enigmatic stone box. Cut to today, and a young woman listening to a voicemail from what sounds like her mother, who was very happy that she visited. Now she’s getting out of the back of a semi, flinching against the light, one of many people packed in the trailer, like cargo. She’s being hustled out, as if the driver is anxious not to get caught.

Her name is Ambar, and she’s come to Cleveland, OH from Mexico. She’s trying to start over, make a new life in the United States. Ambar is undocumented, though, which makes things hard. She takes an exhausting job in a sweatshop where she gets paid in cash. It’s a life on the margins, and she can’t keep staying in a motel - the proprietor wants to see her ID. So she snags an ad for a boarding house advertising cheap rooms. It’s run by a taciturn fellow named Red, who doesn’t ask for her ID, but does ask for a month’s rent up front. It’s an old building, run-down, in a depressed part of town. There are rules: No smoking in the rooms, no male visitors. Red says she’s one of two occupants at the moment, but Ambar can hear other women at night through the walls, sobbing. There are other rules: Red’s office is private. The basement is private.

Don’t go into the basement.

I know it’s not especially strong praise, but this film could have been so, so much worse than it is, and honestly a lot of the time I was very pleasantly surprised. It’s a much more restrained and understated movie than I was expecting - the editing is crisp and terse, and the film makes good, effective use of small reveals and careful, tasteful use of repeated motifs, both visual and narrative, throughout. Even more importantly, for a film that could be exploitative caricature - young woman all alone in a city full of people ready to take advantage of her - almost everyone comes off like real people. It’s not a character study or anything, but even the antagonistic characters are portrayed at a human scale and aren’t just two-dimensional villains, and interactions between people feel natural and believable. This is a film that is confident to let unsettling things happen in the background instead of relying on loud noises and jump scares, and that buys a lot of goodwill with me.

The first act is relatively quiet, focused mostly on Ambar’s tenuous situation and how vulnerable she is as an undocumented immigrant, and that builds some tension on its own. It has some parallels to His House, in that sense, though I think that’s a stronger film. Still, like that film, this is about a stranger in a strange land trying to build something for themselves while constantly being plagued by setbacks, and that does pretty good work on its own. Ambar’s desperation feels real without being forced or melodramatic, and as the first act progresses, we start to get hints of something being not right around the edges on top of what is already a very precarious position. If anything, the first act is maybe a little too restrained and quiet, and I worried that it was just going to putter along in this gear until the end, but the second act complicates Ambar’s situation further, and the pace picks up steadily moving toward the climax.

But the pacing is still sort of a problem. It’s a story about how things aren’t what they appear to be and that’s fine as far as it goes, but it also relies on a narrative feint where the truth isn’t what you expect it to be either. You’re lead to believe Ambar is in one kind of trouble, but it turns out to be much, much worse. Again, this is absolutely fine, but it gives the game away too early on - inside of the first act a number of clues are dropped toward what’s actually going on, and so the final reveal in the third act doesn’t hit with the force that it could. Part of this could be because I was spoiled for the last act going into it, but I think part of it is also that it signposts some things entirely too clearly at the expense of what you think is supposed to be going on. It’s tough to talk about it too much without spoiling the film, but the filmmakers don’t commit hard enough to the story of the kind of trouble that Ambar is supposed to be in for the truth to be much of a twist.

Part of what helps make up for this is the cinematography. It’s a dark, gloomy movie - daytime scenes are overcast, broken up by occasional more brightly-lit moments of relief that are nonetheless awkward or end up going sour, which nicely sets a mood. But the nighttime scenes (and most of the interiors in the boarding house) are sometimes so dark that it’s tough to know what we’re supposed to be looking at. When they’re lit, it’s appropriately drab and sickly or bathed in candlelight which is nonetheless not especially comforting. So the visuals, along with the acting and editing and characterization, go a long way. Most of the settings feel real as well, with the unfortunate exception of the boarding house interior, which feels much larger than it appears on the outside. The effect is less supernatural and more just revealing that it’s a set. That said, it doesn’t look especially cheap. It’s not a film that leans too heavily into gore or special effects for most of its runtime, but that changes in the final act, and then what’s there is believable and striking.

So the human elements of the story - Ambar’s attempts to establish herself in the U.S. and the obstacles in her way, the way she interacts with others and how they treat her. - feel true and generate a low-level sense of dread as you know things aren’t going to go well, and so the escalation to something worse and then no, something even worse than that should stack on top of the existing unease, but giving away important details early undercuts that. Even though it’s a smart film in a lot of ways, it also never really builds up the head of steam that it needs to. Once things do ramp up it mostly works, but the whole thing ends on a disappointingly conventional note in Final Girl mode, and it just feels like there were more interesting places to go with it. It all feels…fitful, like the flickering lights that signal something bad is about to happen throughout the film. Sometimes it works really well, sometimes it doesn’t. So no, it’s not what it seems, in that it’s a much better-made film than you’d expect, but if it had done a better job of selling us on what we were expecting the story to be, then the reveal of what it truly was would have hit even harder.

IMDB entry
Available on Netflix