Josh Reviews No One Will Save You

No One Will Save You is a sci-fi/horror film on Hulu, written and directed by Brian Duffield.  The film focuses on Brynn (Kaitlyn Dever), a young woman living an isolated existence.  She seems to be a pariah from the small town she lives near, for reasons that are at first unclear to us.  Despite her solitude, Brynn seems to have created a full life for herself, living on her own in a large, beautiful house in the woods.  That life is disrupted when she wakes up one night to find an alien creature has entered her home… and does not appear to mean her well.  Brynn fights back, and things escalate from there.

The intriguing hook of No One Will Save You is that it’s a film that is basically without any spoken dialogue.  It’s a very cool conceit, and it’s executed marvelously.  It’s what elevates the film beyond the standard sort of horror movie fare.  (There are not many examples of films without dialogue that I can think of.  J.C. Chandor’s 2013 film All is Lost, starring Robert Redford, comes to mind as an excellent example of this very niche sub-genre.)

For much of the film, Kaitlyn Dever (so memorable in Booksmart) is the only actor we see on-screen, and she effortlessly carries the film on her shoulders.  Without dialogue, Ms. Dever must express all of the emotion roiling inside her character through her posture, her face, and particularly her eyes.  It’s a wonderful performance.  Ms. Dever is a star!

I loved the design of the aliens in the film.  What we see at first is an interesting twist on the classic alien “greys” — the humanoid-looking aliens familiar from UFO lore.  But then we get an even more interesting variety, each weirder and scarier than what we’d seen before.  (The huge spider-like alien was a favorite for me!)

For the first three-fourths of this film, I loved it.  I was completely hooked into the story.  I loved the dual mystery of what was going on with the apparent alien invasion menacing Brynn and her town, and also the question of what terrible thing had happened in her past.  I was impressed by how Mr. Duffield masterfully dialed up the tension as the story unfolded.  I was on the edge of my seat.

I wish I liked the last twenty minutes more than I did.  The film takes several sharp turns into weirdness and, frankly, I didn’t understand it.  The film seems to have multiple contradictory endings and I was left with lots of questions.  (For instance: what was up with that duplicate of Brynn in the forest??  Where did that come from?  What was its purpose?)  I wish the ending was more satisfying.

I still think this film is worth watching.  It has a cool concept and a wonderful lead performance from Kaitlyn Dever.  Sadly the weak ending lowers it in my estimation.

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