While the company continues to funnel ridiculous amounts of money into star-studded Hollywood blockbusters that more often than not decimate the viewership charts while taking a well-earned battering from critics, Nowhere is further proof that sometimes – or a lot of times in Netflix’s case – less is most definitely more.
The Spanish-language survival thriller cost a fraction of the streaming service’s exclusives boasting big names, high concept, and oodles of visual effects, but after just three and a half weeks in release it’s already the second most-watched non-English original feature film in the platform’s history.
Notching 130.5 million hours since premiering on Sept. 29 – during which period it topped Netflix’s own in-house metrics for two weeks in a row – the only foreign-language movie to have racked up more hours in its first 28 days of availability is Norwegian creature feature Troll.
The nerve-shredding premise follows Anna Castillo’s Mia, a pregnant woman who flees her native country by hiding in a shipping container. However, when she gets separated from her husband and left floating aimlessly at sea following a violent storm, she faces the pressure of not just potentially giving birth in a metal tomb rapidly filling up with water, but making it to safety whatever the cost.
It’s doubtful that anyone would have been expecting Nowhere to end up as one of Netflix’s biggest-ever international hits when it debuted, but it just goes to show that you don’t need to spend north of $100 million to deliver what’s proven right there in the numbers to be an all-timer of a success story.
