No One Gets Out Alive-- My take on the movie with Spoilers!

 

PLOT SUMMARY: Ambar enters the country illegally in order to make a life for herself. But when she takes a room in a boarding house, she soon discovers the dangers that lurk inside. 

What are dreams?

Theoretically, they are just images and our feelings and responses.

It was also thought that dreams were a way to get rid of unwanted memories.

Either way, chances are you probably don't remember every detail of your dream upon waking up. And when you do, you remember bits and pieces of it.

Dreams also rarely work like a movie where the story flows continuously and is meaningful.

How many dreams can you remember that played out as a story with a beginning, middle and end?

No one gets out alive is mostly about dreams. The horror part in the movies are dreams induced by the dark entity that wants to consume people.

Now we have seen plenty of dream sequences in movies. A character experiences a scare in the middle of the night, comes face to face with a demon and then wakes up safe and sound in their bed.

It's okay if it happens maybe once or twice in a movie. But when it happens several times and it's the sole provider of horror in the movie, then these sequences become tiresome.

For example, the character dreams of being on a train, and then a minute later, the lights flicker and go off and she faces a monster. She wakes up. It's a dream; one with a boring start. How many times have we dreamed of just sitting somewhere and doing nothing?

NO ONE GETS OUT ALIVE Movie Plot 

The movie begins with a woman sitting on a couch and making a desperate call to her brother. She tells him about the nightmares and that she feels haunted. Her brother wants her to make amends with her father if she wants to come back. The woman doesn't seem keen. Just then, she sees a ghost with glowing eyes and then a box in the passageway. Someone attacks her from behind.

We are then introduced to a woman called Ambar. She has just come from Mexico, illegally. She is told to provide an ID at a hostel, finds work in a clothing factory and it is there that she finds an ad for a boarding house. She goes there, and it's the same house we've seen in the first scene. The man,  Red, shows her around and clearly, the house isn't in good shape. Nor is the bed on which Ambar will have to sleep on. It's broken from one side and Red pushes a box underneath to stop it from collapsing with a promise that he will fix it soon. We never get to see him fix the bed.

Ambar has to give up most of her savings to live in the house but she doesn't have much of a choice because Red hasn't requested her ID. She pays it and overhears another woman, whom Red calls Freja and one who can't speak English.

Ambar hears Freja crying almost every night.

At work, Ambar befriends a woman called Kinsi who tries to help her obtain an ID. Ambar is keen to be shown as someone who is from Texas. Kinsi tells her it will cost more.

They go out to get drunk and Kinsi tells her to give her what she has and the rest she will loan to her because Ambar's cousin was going to help her get a job where she will earn more. Ambar readily gives her all the money she has.

The next day Kinsi doesn't come in for work. She has absconded with the money. Faith in humanity destroyed.

Ambar thinks she sees things around the house and learns that Freja left the house. Two new Romanian girls come to live.

Ambar needs her deposit back from Red after she's fired from her job. Red tells her it is all gone. Ambar has nightmares that serve as jump-scare moments. At one point she finds out how her bed broke...a man chased a woman around the room and she jumped on the bed too hard.

Ambar freaks out and leaves. She tries to call her cousin for help but he tells her he has gone to drop his son at college. He isn't too happy she lied about where she was from.

Ambar also keeps dreaming about her mother who she had taken care of for a long time and who passed away recently.

She calls up Red who tells her he has her deposit and she then asks him to come to a cafe. He tells her about his brother Becker whom she say one night banging his head against the wall and how he wasn't too thrilled that she wanted her deposit back.

Ambar asks for her money and Red, who has bruises on his face, tells her he left it in the house. She isn't too thrilled to go back there but she needs the money desperately.

Once there, she is trapped by the two brothers and finds the two Romanian women all tied up. They are made to dress in robes and have some green Ash smeared over their bodies.

Red explains how his father had found a box on one of his expeditions and then became obsessed with hurting women. He had hurt his wife too and when Red and his brother came home and saw what their father had done, they killed him.

Becker was sick for a long time and after the killing, he started to get better and realized the box had supernatural powers. All it needed was a sacrifice.

Ambar realizes that the women they had kidnapped was probably responsible for Red's bruises and explained how women kept disappearing in the house including the one we see in the beginning. 

NO ONE GETS OUT ALIVE Ending Explained with Spoilers! 

Ambar manages to make a call to her cousin who comes running to see her. Red tries to dissuade him from entering but the cousin sees the jacket he had donated to Ambar and enters forcefully. Becker kills him and all Ambar sees from behind a locked door is blood and teeth.

Ambar is the next one taken downstairs and finds herself strapped to a table in front of the box which when opened looks like a tunnel. She remembers the book she saw in Red's study, the one room she was told not to go into but does anyway like in every horror movie. She remembers seeing his collection of butterflies, moths and beetles and the weird illustration of people sacrificing others in front of the box who then have their heads cut off.

Ambar finds her cousin by her side. He opens the door, unties her and tells her it is a miracle he survived. They barely make it to the door before Ambar realizes her cousin coming to rescue her was just a dream.

A creature comes out of the box and looks like a giant, slimy spider with a human head. She induces another dream into Ambar as she nears.

Ambar finds herself in the hospital with her mother who tells her if she could stay with her. Ambar says no after a very long pause and then smothers her with a pillow.

She wakes up to find the creature retreating and closing the box. Apparently, the creature was feeding on Ambar's guilt of not staying longer with her mother and once Ambar "killed" that guilt, the creature no longer wanted to consume her.

The woman, in the beginning, felt guilty too for leaving her home which was why she must have been successfully sacrificed to the creature.

No idea about the other women and if they too had the privilege of being tested by the creature before having their heads chewed off.

Ambar decides to take on the brothers and uses the weapon she saw in Red's room to strike them. Becker breaks her foot and somehow she manages to recover from it enough to kill Red and bash Becker's skull with the weapon.

Later, she drags Red's body all the way downstairs and even manages to place him on the platform to get sacrificed. It was insinuated that she felt guilty for entrapping women but did nothing because he thought he was helping his brother. His head is quickly separated from his body.

Ambar limps to the front door, realizing she has no cousin to help her get a job or any money. And she had been fired from her job too.

But as she nears, her foot miraculously straightens and all her injuries heal. She realizes the sacrifice she made to the creature healed her.

Ambar was never violent and showed empathy to the other women. Even when she heard Freja crying she felt bad enough to approach her and ask what happened. Freja could speak English and Red had lied about that too.

But Ambar doesn't have anywhere to go either. She has a big house and a magical box that can heal her. When it comes to surviving or doing the right thing, what would Ambar actually choose?

Maybe she won't have to sacrifice helpless women. Maybe she's thinking about offering men who take advantage of women, as sacrifices.

It is uncertain what path Ambar will take as the movie closes.

Scare scale: 3/5