No Way Down Review | Fantastic Fest 2026
Every festival has that one movie — the one that hits almost immediately and never gives you a reason to reconsider. At Fantastic Fest 2026, that movie for me was No Way Down, the French urban survival horror film originally titled Kraken.
The feature debut from directors Mohamed Chabane and Théo Jourdain Rhodes is an aggressive mixture of crime thriller, slasher and survival horror, set against a side of contemporary France that genre cinema doesn’t explore nearly enough. It has action, humor, memorable characters, vicious kills and a social undercurrent that gives all of that mayhem considerably more weight.
Most importantly, it’s ridiculously entertaining.
Fresh out of prison, Idriss (Alassane Diong) is trying to separate himself from the criminal life that put him there in the first place. He wants to rebuild what he can, including his fractured relationship with his ex, Mélia, and avoid falling straight back into the circumstances he just escaped.
But sometimes wanting out isn’t enough.
There are relationships, debts and loyalties that don’t disappear simply because someone has decided to change. Idriss quickly finds himself being pulled back toward the people and neighborhood he was attempting to leave behind, eventually bringing him to the film’s real centerpiece: the Kraken.
It’s a gigantic, burned-out residential tower looming over the surrounding banlieue, an abandoned concrete monstrosity that has accumulated rumors of disappearances and become its own neighborhood legend. The building feels less like a location than a living piece of the community’s history — one that everyone knows they should stay away from but that refuses to disappear.
Once a group ventures inside, No Way Down transforms.
The crime drama becomes a survival nightmare as a merciless killer begins stalking the building. Floors, stairwells, corridors and abandoned rooms turn into hunting grounds, while the killer’s motives gradually suggest something more personal than random violence.
Chabane and Jourdain Rhodes understand exactly what they have with this location. The Kraken isn’t merely somewhere to stage a slasher. Its decay, isolation and history become inseparable from the people trapped inside it.
That distinction is important because No Way Down works on two levels without allowing either one to suffocate the other.
There is plenty happening beneath the surface involving poverty, neglected communities, immigrant families, neighborhood crime and young people attempting to find status or opportunity inside an environment offering few conventional routes toward either. Influencer culture even finds its way into the equation, with the promise of attention and online relevance becoming another reason to venture somewhere nobody should be entering.
But the filmmakers never forget they’re making a horror movie.
Once the film starts tightening the screws, it moves.
The action works. The comedy works. The characters are memorable enough that their survival matters. And when No Way Down decides it’s time for someone to die, Chabane and Jourdain Rhodes aren’t particularly interested in being polite about it.
The kills are brutal, energetic and occasionally shocking, but they don’t feel disconnected from the gritty world established around them. That consistency is one of the film’s biggest strengths. Whether we’re watching neighborhood drama, character comedy, a chase or an eruption of violence, it all feels like part of the same movie.
Diong is particularly effective at the center of it.
Idriss isn’t presented as someone discovering danger for the first time. He’s a man who already understands violence and desperately wants to stop allowing it to determine his life. That makes his return to the Kraken more compelling than the standard horror protagonist wandering into the wrong building. He’s being pulled toward something he has spent the film trying to escape.
There are echoes here of what Sébastien Vaniček accomplished with Infested, another French genre film that found horror inside a deteriorating residential environment rather than escaping to an isolated cabin or remote forest. No Way Down isn’t simply repeating that formula, but both films recognize how naturally neglected urban architecture can become a horror landscape.
We need more of that.
Genre cinema has spent decades convincing audiences that the woods are terrifying. Abandoned apartment towers, deteriorating housing projects and forgotten sections of major cities can be every bit as frightening — and they bring their own histories, communities and social tensions with them.
French filmmakers increasingly seem willing to explore those spaces without sanding away their identity. The France represented here isn’t postcards, landmarks and polished Parisian glamour. It’s concrete, graffiti, cramped apartments, abandoned structures and young people attempting to navigate circumstances that existed long before the monster showed up.
American horror could stand to take notice.
There is enormous untapped potential in horror stories rooted in predominantly Black and brown urban neighborhoods without treating those communities merely as background scenery or transforming every story into a prestige social allegory. Sometimes the neighborhood can matter, the characters can matter, the social conditions can matter — and the movie can still deliver one hell of a slasher.
No Way Down does exactly that.
Chabane and Jourdain Rhodes show remarkable confidence for first-time feature directors. Their movie is stylish without becoming distracted by style, socially conscious without turning into a lecture and violent without losing sight of the people experiencing that violence.
From its opening stretch, I had the feeling this was going to be my kind of movie. It never gave me a reason to change my mind.
Even when it ended, I wanted more.
That’s about the strongest compliment I can give a festival film after spending days watching movies back-to-back. No Way Down didn’t simply survive Fantastic Fest 2026 for me. It rose above everything else I watched there.
Mohamed Chabane and Théo Jourdain Rhodes have arrived with ferocity, personality and a clear understanding of how to make genre filmmaking both culturally specific and universally entertaining.
Whatever they do next, I’ll be watching.
Rating: 4.5/5
Reviewed as part of Horror Movies Uncut's Fantastic Fest 2026 coverage in Austin, Texas.
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