Dropped without much fanfare on Disney+, well-executed sci-fi/horror No One Will Save You shows an alienated young woman facing off against classic, big-eyed grey aliens. Eliza Janssen wishes she’d seen it in cinemas, dialogue or no.
No One Will Save You
Brynn (Kaitlyn Dever) has nailed the #cottagecore aesthetic. She lives alone in a big, gorgeous home, surrounded by acres of lonely forest. She teaches herself how to waltz to vintage records, mailing out adorable homemade garments as a source of income.
It’s simple, girly! All you need to do is alienate yourself from the surrounding community, who absolutely despise you for some shadowy incident that occurred between you and your late friend Maureen back when the two of you were 12-year-old besties.
“Alienate” being an important term here, because Dever’s twee loner quickly experiences a slew of intergalactic home invasions—turning No One Will Save You from a sad character study into an electrifying alien thriller. The film’s ending is a compelling can of worms, too. Shame you can’t chat with your mates about it in the lobby after seeing this well-executed movie in a cinema.
Director and writer Brian Duffield has made a name for himself with genre-mashing, high-concept tales of young people battling the unbelievable, after so-so apocalyptic adventure Love and Monsters and the intelligent, nihilistic high school rom-com Spontaneous. Here he gives himself—and endlessly watchable star Dever—a distinct creative challenge, by producing a script with just about one line of dialogue. We only know that “no one will save” Brynn through wounding, wordless glances; Dever’s expressive grunts and screams; some perhaps on-the-nose close-ups of letters, old photos, and gravestones.
Whatever happened that made Brynn a local pariah is almost as intriguing as the UFO abduction action, a mystery that both fuels our resourceful hero and cleverly distances us from her. She seems like such a nice gal, and when she shockingly dispatches that first big-eyed extra-terrestrial intruder early on in the film, we might cheer. Surely whatever she did can’t be that bad. Can it?
Duffield’s direction hides and exposes his alien baddies at just the right moments, giving us a refreshingly clear look at the antagonists when it matters. These are your grandaddy’s UFOs, with grey skin, big bobble heads on twiggy limbs, and classic Twilight Zone flying saucers, tractor beams and all…until they’re not. It’s a thrill to see different, more terrifying breeds of the stereotypical E.T.s sent in to attack Brynn, even though their twitchy, vogue-the-house-down-boots movements are sometimes let down by overly slick, TV-quality CGI.
Racing from room to room and from the clutches of possessed abductees to the depths of the eerie forest around her, Brynn grows into a Predator-esque champion of humanity against the invaders. She’s hardened and savvy from years of living alone, of facing her town’s wrath and shaming, and both this personal guilt and the film’s sci-fi structure culminate in a somewhat confusing climax. There’s a bit too much back-and-forth in the pivotal, pacey third act, with Brynn tiresomely picked up and dropped down by the saucer’s tractor beams. Her visions of Maude are soulful, thanks to Dever’s empathetic, committed expressiveness. But the film’s decision to forfeit dialogue hamstrings it a little in this X-Files-y plot culmination, leaving the final scenes up to our interpretation after a momentum-slowing emotional beat.
With its experimental screenplay and exciting, scary action scenes, No One Will Save You feels like a worthy descendant of M. Night Shyamalan’s Signs; interpreting retro alien imagery as a path to long-due spiritual reckoning. Some of its most suspenseful moments might, against all odds, make you scared of the cute lil alien emoji. 👽.
The film’s biggest problem, some mid CGI and an unclear climax aside, is that it wasn’t given the chance to screen in cinemas, where it would have elicited hearty screams from an audience often left on the edge of their seats. Let Duffield and Dever draw you into their streaming tractor beam, anyhow: no words of agreement necessary.
