Nobody gets out alive: Netflix’s immigration horror movie won’t connect

Netflix’s haunted house thriller Nobody gets out alive he’s trying to turn the fears of undocumented immigrants into gruesome scares, but the opening scene exemplifies all the ways those goals fall short. A woman on the phone with her brother sits in a dark green room as a storm rages outside. On television, a news program shows undocumented immigrants arrested by the Border Patrol. A few wet footsteps drag on the ground and the light goes out. She spots a box at the end of the hall, and is then summarily attacked by a glowing-eyed ghost.

It’s a standard horror movie premiere, meant to explain the rules of this world. And the sequence would work, if it weren’t so disconnected from the rest of the movie. Because for the next 85 minutes, the ghost won’t work this way. The enchanted box will not act similarly. The issue of immigration will be as distant as the television screen. The dilapidated four-story Victorian house in which this film is set will be as generic as any other. And we never hear anything more about that character again.

An adaptation of Adam Nevill’s 2014 horror novel, scripted by Jon Croker and Fernanda Coppel and directed by Santiago Menghini, Nobody gets out alive is a desperate attempt to explore the immigration crisis through a lens of horror, Remi Weekes’ stunning film His house. But Menghini’s film is a subscribed hodgepodge of hollow scares.

It’s a shame, given the intriguing premise. Ambar (a disappointing Cristina Rodlo) has just arrived in the United States from Mexico after caring for her ailing mother for several years. You are now in the United States seeking a degree in business administration. Her distant and wealthy uncle (David Barrera) has even arranged a job interview for her. But she has an obstacle: having arrived hidden in the back of a truck, she has no identification. Without one, you cannot interview. You also cannot stay at the motel where you have been renting a room, because the owner now requires identification. While making money as a seamstress on an illegal farm, she sees an advertisement for cheap rooms in a place called Schofield Heights.

The Victorian house does not have a unique design. Director of photography Stephen Murphy’s blue-green lighting combines with turquoise wallpaper and plethora of leather chairs to give the film a steampunk aesthetic. Squeaking noises and strange voices emanate from the building’s basement, but the owner, Red (Marc Menchaca), doesn’t want anyone to go there to check on the situation. There is also green dust on the walls. The only distinctively designed room in the house is the study: there, dioramas of the Beatles, butterflies and skulls decorate the walls. An audiotape of ancient ritual killings is played in a loop. Perfectly normal things.

The hiccups in this movie are partly due to the adaptation. Fans of the book will notice major changes. For example, Neville’s novel centers on a lonely woman named Stephanie who is tired of working temporary jobs and living in a terrible house. In their iteration, Croker and Coppel recast Stephanie as Ambar, and populate the house with other immigrant women, such as Freja (Vala Noren) and two Romanian sex workers named Maria and Petra. But the writers don’t rearrange these women enough to unravel the deeper themes they hope to explore. While the novel dealt with poverty, this version uses Ambar’s economic disadvantage as a reason for his entry into the country, but does little else with that idea once he arrives.

Compare His house for Nobody gets out alive, and the frayed components of this film are evident. Like the two protagonists in Weekes’ film about the haunted house, Ambar is devastated by the survivor’s guilt. Every night he listens to his deceased mother’s voicemail and dreams of the days he spent with her in the hospital. Neither her pain nor her regret for putting her life on hold to care for her mother becomes tangible. Outside of a scene in which Ambar sees a policeman in a restaurant, the hostility of the outside world towards immigrants is not translated.

Cultural imagery does not bubble to the surface as it did in His house, any. To open the film, Menghini presents a super-8 sequence of a professor Aurhur Welles, in 1963 Mexico, pulling a mystery box from a hole in the ground. Ambar often dreams of this box and the puzzling creature that lives inside it. Where His house leverages African folklore for gruesome gruesome, pre-Columbian references in Nobody gets out alive they hardly rise above the incidental.

Aside from the mysterious wardrobe and the practical effect of the glowing eyes, the ghosts that populate the Victorian home are also debatable. They don’t attack Ambar. Instead, he witnesses how they were killed by a woman. Given that the movie opens with ghosts attacking a woman, and it’s clear that gender is not an issue in its lens, it’s strange that no explanation is offered as to how or why Ambar remains intact. Instead, the main threat to her appears to be Red’s older brother, Becker (David Figlioli), a huge mass labeled by Red as mentally ill.

The ghosts represent the many forms Nobody gets out alive break your own rules. When the mysterious creature appears on screen, Menghini presents it as a beast that lulls victims into deep dreams, where their loved ones are apparitions used by the beast to lull them into complacency. The state of restlessness allows the colorful demon to behead its prey. However, in the final scenes, which feature a lot of blood and retaliation, the creature does not perform any of this supposed killing ritual.

Nobody gets out alive He doesn’t restructure the haunted house premise and doesn’t use his familiar constructions for more scares. Nor does he take advantage of the immigration issue to scare or make convincing comments. Instead, Menghini’s vision is a boring journey that suffers from uneven writing. The laxity of immigration issues is daunting, because too often, horror can cause audiences to reconsider their misconceptions and see people in their most real humanity. At a time when immigration remains a hot topic and the dehumanization of immigrants continues around the world, this film not only fails to provide the scares needed, it does little to redo the conversation or offer some kind of empathy or insight. significant.

Nobody gets out alive it’s streaming on Netflix now.