No One Gets Out Alive (2021)

No One Gets Out Alive arrives with the modest ambition of a Netflix genre picture and the slightly grander ambition of an arthouse one. Ambar, played by Cristina Rodlo, is an undocumented Mexican woman in Cleveland, working under the table, guarding her savings, hunting for a room. The boarding house she finds is run by Red, who wants the first month up front, and the film treats that transaction with the grim weight of a hostage negotiation. The immigrant experience here is not decoration. Stolen wages, a fake ID that turns out to be a con, an employer who fires her for asking questions: the machinery of precarity grinds on schedule, and it earns the film its measure of social consciousness without ever stopping to explain itself.

Then the ghosts arrive, and the film becomes a different, less disciplined animal. Red's father brought a stone box home from Mexico in 1963, and the box wants women. Becker, the mentally ill brother, is the muscle; his health improves with each sacrifice, which is the film's way of making exploitation literal. It is a haunted-house story with an Aztec goddess and a moth the size of a dinner plate, and it handles this material with more conviction than the script deserves. The gender politics sit just beneath the surface: men sacrificing women, a survivor who takes up an obsidian blade and returns the favor. The film never says the word, and it is better for it.

Rodlo is excellent, and the film's brief interest in her character's economic terror is its most durable asset. What it does with that terror is another matter. The final act trades the specificity of immigrant life for a blood-soaked basement and a sequel-shaped ending, a trade most horror films make and few survive intact. The result is a competent, occasionally striking debut that gestures toward significance and settles for atmosphere. Three stars, and a note of caution for anyone expecting the sermon the marketing implied.