Director – Santiago Menghini, Screenplay – Fernanda Coppel & Jon Croker, Story – Jon Croker, Based on the Novel by Adam Nevill, Producers – Jonathan Cavendish & Will Tennant, Photography – Stephen Murphy, Music – Mark Korven, Visual Effects Supervisor – Nuno Pereira, Visual Effects – Unit Film TV, Special Effects Supervisor – Yovko Dogandjiiski, Creature Designer – Keith Thompson, Prosthetics Designer – Ionel Popa, Production Design – Christopher Richmond. Production Company – The Imaginarium.
Ambar Cruz arrives in Cleveland, having crossed the US border from Mexico illegally in order to see her dying mother. She gets a cash job in a clothing factory and takes a room in the rundown boarding house run by Red. She finds unsettling things occurring in the house – voices crying through the walls, other tenants who mysteriously disappear. She becomes fearful of Red’s brother Becker who lives in the locked basement but her efforts to leave are hampered by her undocumented circumstances and lack of money.
The great surprise about No One Gets Out Alive is that as you watch it you make assumptions about it – but then in reading about the making of the film, these are completely overturned. You assume that director Santiago Menghini is making a film taken from personal experience of Mexican illegals to the US but then find that he actually grew up in Canada. Moreover, while the film is rooted in the undocumented Mexican experience, the screenplay and the book it is based on are written by Caucasians. Furthermore, while the film is said to take place in Cleveland it was, apart from some location shooting, actually filmed in Romania and is not even an American production but comes from the British-based The Imaginarium production company of actor Andy Serkis.
Mexican illegal immigrants to the US have not been treated well on screen (in genre material at least) – in films like Undocumented (2010), Desierto (2015) and Beneath Us (2019), they are variously shown being hunted or tortured. While No One Gets Out Alive does not go to the extremes of these other films, what it does capture well is how the undocumented immigrant is the lowest on the rung of human consideration in American society, exploited at every turn from being instantly dismissed from a cash-only job to a friend with supposed connections taking Cristina Rodlo’s money on the promise of papers and disappearing, Cristina’s safety being at the whims of whether a landlord will refund a deposit, or her not being able to ask help of her cousin because she is unwilling to admit her lack of legal status.
Cristina Rodlo encounters sinister figures in the halls
The production design team do an amazing job of creating a house that looks rundown and haunted. (Not to mention one that looks bigger on the inside – the interior hallways seem to run the entire length of a city block, even though the exterior of the house only seems the size of a regular urban section). This is something that is clearly the fantasy of production designers who have never visited low-income housing in their lives. As a former building manager, I can testify that no landlord is ever going to rent out a room the size of the one that Cristina Rodlo moves into for peanuts – they could easily get a decent rate for such a room while the reality of rooms available to her given her status and income would barely be one the size of a bathroom.
That said, director Santiago Menghini puts the sets to great use. The background is filled with sinister shapes, people constantly creeping up on Cristina Rodlo or whispered noises coming through the walls. The film gets top marks for its atmosphere. There is no real explanation for what is going on in the house until we arrive at the unearthly creature in the basement at the end, where the film takes on peculiarly Lovecraftian overtones. (Presumably the motion capture process used to create this was what interested Andy Serkis and his company).
