No One Gets Out Alive

This is a supernatural horror movie with very real violence perpetrated on undocumented female immigrants. Based on a novel, No One Gets Out Alive is at its best when it depicts the all-too-real nightmare of women who are undocumented immigrants trying to survive in contemporary America. The struggles Ambar faces in attaining an ID that will help her get a better job than the sweatshop job she currently works, of keeping the sweatshop job she has, of finding a place to live, of being almost completely alone in a strange and harsh new environment -- these scenes are among the most powerful and engaging. That helplessness comes through, and often feels more frightening than the ghostly apparitions popping up around the shabby Cleveland boardinghouse where Ambar takes up residence and backstory of archeologists gone mad.

Indeed, the violence perpetrated against Ambar and the other immigrant women living in the boardinghouse is so graphic and disturbing, it makes the later scenes of a demon-in-a-box hungry for human sacrifice tame, or even ludicrous, by comparison to the assault that went on in the scenes prior to the big reveals of Act Three. The acting is very good across the board, but the story itself, as disturbingly grisly as some of the more realistic violence is, becomes a bit of a standard-grade haunted house story, with the obligatory Supernatural Forces Unleashed at some point in the past that are lurking in the Mysterious and Creepy Basement. It ends how it ends, but it's almost a foregone conclusion that what will stay with viewers long after watching this isn't the proverbial big reveal, but the gruesome violence that happened in the scenes leading up to it.