Nowhere,” the latest international Netflix thriller, takes a bit too long to find itself, and struggles with tone, but a committed performance by Anna Castillo keeps it from drifting off to the horizon. After a clunky prologue that chooses to place this refugee crisis in a dystopian future where women and children are being caged and murdered (instead of just actual refugee hotspots around the world in the 2020s), “Nowhere” becomes a single-setting, single-character survival story. Here’s where the movie almost works consistently, centering a woman who will do whatever it takes to keep herself and new newborn baby alive. There are some disappointing choices in the film’s directing, but Castillo’s performance should make a lot of those easy to overlook for anyone who stumbles upon this one in their streaming algorithm.
Castillo plays Mia, the very pregnant partner of Nico (Tamar Novas). We meet the couple already on the run from a country in a violent crisis. They hide from dogs and helicopter spotlights in a cargo yard before entering one of the shipping containers, bound for freedom. Of course, the journey doesn’t go well, and the couple ends up split up into two separate containers. Nico goes off to what looks like it will be a violent end while Mia is stuck with a bunch of strangers before their vessel is captured by soldiers, and, well, everyone but Mia ends up murdered. Before you know it, Mia is adrift in the ocean with few supplies and no way to get home. And then she goes into labor.
