What’s worse than someone breaking into your house in the middle of the night? Something breaking in. That’s the setup for Brian Duffield’s tense sci-fi thriller, No One Will Save You.
Brynn (Kaitlyn Dever) is a young woman who lives alone in a big house in a small town following her mother’s death three years earlier. Alienated from her community because of a past tragedy, she bides her time by creating a model village, making and mailing clothes, and practicing steps for a dance she likely will never be asked to join. She’s lonely, but trying to wrap herself in whatever happiness she can conjure.
And then, one night, the lights flicker. Brynn hears a noise and decides to investigate. She creeps downstairs only to find the door of her isolated country house wide open, and the sound of shuffling in the next room. She hides from the intruder, which soon reveals itself to be of extraterrestrial origin.
If it sounds a bit familiar, you could be forgiven. Writer-director Duffield pulls from a variety of well-trod sources. The design of the aliens – at least early on – is cribbed from the classic “little green men” aesthetic, and it’s not much of a spoiler to suggest that flying saucers make an appearance. At various times, set pieces and chunks of the plot pull from a variety of other thrillers and alien invasion movies, and it’s not too much of a stretch to say this movie feels like Duffield put Signs, Close Encounters of the Third Kind, The Strangers, and Home Alone into a blender and hit “puree.”
Despite its familiarity, No One Will Save You never feels overly derivative. The script is propulsive, quickly revealing new threats and twists to toss at Brynn, and Duffield adds his own spin by making the film nearly dialogue-free. The director, who wrote the script for The Babysitter and Love and Monsters and directed the cult indie Spontaneous, showcases a love for the genre tropes and understands when to shoot for more traditional scares and when to toss a curveball at audiences.
Duffield’s got a great eye for set pieces and screw-tightening. He largely stays away from jump scares, instead choosing to draw suspense and terror out of careful attention to the background and creatures rising out of the darkness. The film’s sound design is impeccable, drawing tension out of every creak and bump around the large home (this is a film that would have played well in a packed theater instead of being relegated to Hulu). There are several taut chase sequences inside the home, but the film also wisely understands that it needs to breathe by leaving the house and suggesting even more insidious horrors just around the corner.
The film is also the first in a while to make traditional aliens scary. As previously stated, their designs hew closely to the giant-head, black eyes E.T.s that have been common in American mythology for decades, but there are a few nasty variants in store, as well as a nasty little spin on how they incubate inside of humans. They move with herky-jerky, unnatural movements – even if the CGI falters here and there – and they’re telepathic, making them an even more daunting obstacle for Brynn. These are some little mean men.
Aside from her special effects counterparts, Dever commands the screen – mostly alone – for the majority of the runtime, and gives a fierce performance. She’s willing to be tossed around and terrorized for the better part of an hour, but she also suggests the tragedy and self-deception that have enveloped Brynn over the years, and the loneliness she feels at being ostracized from her community. The film slowly doles out information about Brynn’s past and Dever does a fantastic job selling the character’s trauma so that we understand what she’s feeling even if we don’t always know the specifics.
Kaitlyn Dever in “No One Will Save You.”
The film’s first hour is an all-timer of sci-fi horror, a leaner version of Signs. It’s scary without being too much so for casual horror fans and just when it seems to be getting too familiar, Duffield has another twist up his sleeve to re-contextualize the entire thing. This may only be the director’s sophomore feature, but he proves he has a knack for manipulating audiences and delivering crowd-pleasing scares and reveals; it’s not too much of a stretch to say the film’s first hour moves with the confidence and technical mastery of early Spielberg or Shyamalan.
The film’s final half-hour might be more divisive, as it heads into more surreal and emotional territory. Without giving too much away, it’s here that the film lays its cards on the table about Brynn’s past and also brings her face-to-face with her tormentors, and its leads to a finale that is unsettling and intriguing in content but one that I’m not sure the film quite earns. Dever is fantastic and the film’s final shots will likely be the source of debate for genre fans for years to come, but to that point, the film has been so concerned with being a technical exercise that it fails to lay the emotional groundwork needed to completely connect. It’s not a bad ending, and the idea is intriguing; it just doesn’t quite nail its intended effect. This keeps No One Will Save You from being a great film, but it’s still an immensely entertaining one that confirms Dever’s talents and announces Duffield as a talent to watch. I’m excited to see how he chooses to terrorize audiences next.
