No Salgas (Don’t Come Out)

Rather than leaning on jump scares or baroque excess, Victoria Linares Villegas’s first venture into horror unsettles through a slow accumulation of social pressure, with dread seeping in from the edges of everyday life. The film centres on Liz (Cecile Van Welie), a medical student in the Dominican Republic who joins her boyfriend and friends on a road trip following the violent death of her former girlfriend, carrying guilt and the sense of something darker in tow. The supernatural mechanics remain deliberately vague, but the implications are painfully clear: No Salgas finds its monster disturbingly close to home, woven into the structures of family and friendship.

Linares Villegas favours extremely naturalistic lighting and colour during the road trip portion of the story, bathing beaches, pools and country houses in soft daylight. Parties thrum with neon light and youthful energy, closer to Spring Breakers (2013) than to any horror tradition. There is no underlying visual cue that danger is present – no coded shadows or sickly palettes – so the film reads as a queer coming-of-age drama until something eerie intrudes, violently and without warning, into spaces that feel genuinely lived in..

When the scenes do tip into horror, they do so on the same terms. A standout transition during the climax cuts from a grotesque modernist painting of a face to a bloodied, mutilated visage occupying the same space in the frame. Elsewhere, fear remains unconfronted: a contorting figure glimpsed from behind, locked in a closet and partially obscured by blinds, is made far more ominous by the camera’s refusal to look directly. That said, No Salgas is not immune to genre shorthands: the overuse of red lighting feels clichéd, and some interiors lapse into the typical horror house aesthetic it otherwise works hard to avoid.

Narratively, the film often struggles under the weight of its ambitions. Interludes and arcs pile up, leaving the characters too symbolic. Yet this abstraction recalls It Follows (2014), where the monster signifies something larger and more corrosive; while it falters on a storytelling level, it resonates more strongly thematically. Imperfect but bracing, No Salgas is a timely addition to queer horror: a film that understands fear as communal, intimate and inescapable.