31 Days of Halloween: No One Gets Out Alive

 2021, Santiago Menghini (Milk) -- Netflix

The least thing you can say about this movie is that the horror is based around what the undocumented (illegal immigrants) have to go through. If that is all you get out of this movie, you are not getting much. It is the foundation, a character background, that contributes to the setting of the movie but it is not the primary theme.

Ambar (Cristina Rodlo, Miss Bala) is a young woman who escapes from Mexico to ... Cleveland after the death of her mother. I realized, in watching the movie, that I know very little about Cleveland, not in a pop-culture American TV & movies sort of way, nor in a the-city-has-a-defining-characteristic sort of way. Beyond The Drew Carey Show I know nothing. But according to this movie, it shares much with Detroit, in having cold winters, decrepit buildings repurposed for the desperate, and much of the city is decaying. 

Ambar arrives with enough cash to get her going, fund a faked ID and rent a room for a while. She ends up at the haunted rooming house set between two abandoned, falling down structures, run by a sketchy guy. But it's not like she really has much of choice. While she arranges for the ID, from a fellow sweat shop coworker, so she can apply for the legit job her cousin is setting up for her, she has to just deal. Deal with the creepy rooming house owner, his even creepier brother, and the constant screams and cries from beneath her, which do not seem to have any origin. Well, to her. We, as the movie viewer, get to CONSTANTLY view the glowing eyed ghosts that linger in the background behind Ambar.

Of note, we are also dealing with screams and cries seemingly from the dead, but I know them to be coming from our new downstairs neighbours. Maybe they are haunted.

Not long after being swindled out of her fake ID money, Ambar has to choose between freezing to death or staying in the house, haunted by the dead of previous tenants, or the very living owners. I am not sure Ambar knows who to be more afraid of. But considering the ritual that the owners are performing, I would be more afraid of them.

The movie culminates on an explanation, a full expansion from hauntings to otherworldly monsters creeping out of a mesoamerican version of a dybbuk box, a stone doorway into another dimension from which creeps the most horrible thing of hands, and taught skin and inappropriate mouths. The brothers running the house are sacrificing the young undocumented women to this monster, in return for ... something, something that is curing the older, bully of a brother but not doing much for creepy main brother. Family. There is something to be said for drawing upon the non-Christian mythos and otherworlds, as we also saw in Terrified. I do rather like the idea of other dimensions of horror, the Cthulhuian concept that the most horrible things from from ... somewhere else.

All in all the movie was rather well shot, especially for his first feature, it just needed a tighter story, and to amp up the actual horror.