Hello friends! It’s been a good while. So as I tend to do when I’m depressed, I’ve been watching a lot of scary movies, and in quick succession. I watched Talk to Me, The Possession and then The Taking of Deborah Logan. I took a quick detour to watch the sexploitation slasher Turistas, before rerouting to The Lazarus Effect in an Olivia Wilde double feature. Then I rewatched The Wailing and The Anatomy of Jane Doe, before I finally opted for something I’d seen chatter about online. When I hit play, I didn’t know what it was about, minus a few minor spoilers. After I watched No One Will Save You I went back and reread some of the chatter. I have to say, I don’t really think people are thinking about this movie the way they should.
So. Spoilers!
Running, Running
No One Will Save You is an alien horror film with elements of, what can be best described as, dark humor. There isn’t any slapstick comedy or tongue in cheek bafoonery. It’s best described as, “Well. Fuck. LOL.” It’s also almost entirely devoid of spoken dialogue. And it’s really, really long.
The film starts in fifth gear and revs near redline for most of the way. But in a car engine, redlining the motor will overheat it. You gotta pace yourself. That’s probably why, in movies, they call it ‘pacing’. Not to say that throwing alien horror and revealing the alien design right in the beginning isn’t a bad thing, per se. But I think that the ‘no dialogue’ thing necessitates the film’s plot to progress steadily rather than allowing for too much breathing room. As a result, our sole character Brynn, played by Kaitlyn Dever, spends a lot of time running around. Like, literally running. Shawty really gets her cardio in.
The film keeps throwing alien and alien-related scary crap at us all the way up until the end, where things get really interesting. It’s not bad horror, per se. Some of it is pretty good, equal parts reminiscent of Jurassic Park and also Home Alone and also Nope. There’s an alien who climbs on her slanted roof, then slips off when it tries roaring and posing. It lays there in embarrassment for a moment, before getting back up and continuing its chase. Towards the last hour, the shock and fear wears off, and this type of thing becomes a little more frequent. By that point, I imagine the viewer is pretty tired of the running and screaming. I know I was.
Compounding this fatigue is the overwhelming advantage Brynn’s foes enjoy. They’re telekinetic, have big UFOs, and have, very early on, begun possessing other humans, leaving carnage in their wake. Brynn’s just a girl with an exacto knife and really dope pants. So now with the odds insurmountable (the US Army did not fund this film, so we don’t get any humvees driving around shooting fifty cals at the sky), and the walls close around her. Will she die? Ok. Will she get away? Where will she go? Who will save her? Badum-tiss.
Fresh, Fresh
This film isn’t entirely formulaic. It kept me on my toes, because I couldn’t really identify any cliches or tropes. Again, the world’s going to shit really, really quickly. There’s a lot of aliens, and we’ve already seen them. There’s no dialogue, so there’s no racist shaman who can read some Hebrew and help solve the issue. It lays itself out in one go, allowing Brynn to bounce around the few elements introduced in the film. The lack of characters for Brynn to interact with becomes a real detraction towards the end, compounding the feeling that the film is slogging.
But I kinda get it. The one element that can be characterized as formulaic is the little personal tragedy that Brynn has to grapple with. When she overcomes this personal trauma, she also overcomes this supernatural horror, effectively ending the film. The idea is that this trauma in her childhood has left her completely isolated and ostracized from her community. It’s a triumph of this film, and a major credit to director Brian Duffield, that the groundwork for this personal tragedy is laid so cleanly and sufficiently. The first act sets up that she’s alone and has a hard time interacting with people, and then deletes those people from the film until the third act, where things come back around.
In the climax, Brynn is infected with an alien parasite that puts her in a simulation that corrects her great tragedy. Brynn rejects this reality and the parasite, escaping. She is then faced with a clone of herself, built by the aliens, who tries killing Brynn. Brynn manages to overcome and kill her clone, but then holds the clone in her arms and cries. Following this, she’s finally kidnapped by the aliens, and they probe her memories, realizing that the tragedy has indeed left her in a regretful, isolated state that would not allow them to possess her with the parasite. So, they let her go. The film ends with a scene of Brynn happily dancing with the town citizens, who all take turns dancing with her, validating her, and waving back at her the way she did. Alien ships fly around overhead, and the film ends.
When I reread the comments online discussing the film, people were pointing out how the aliens were all likely possessed by the parasite as well, implying that it was some sort of conquering, roaming interterrestrial threat. Then other people would be like, ‘oh I get it!’ A few told me they thought my reddit comment history was really suspect. But that’s kind of stupid because the film spells that out for us, way before the parasite infects Brynn in the climax. We literally see them climbing around inside of the other townspeople in the first act. Other people complained about the lack of dialogue, calling it a gimmick. Many people were completely befuddled by the ending. Some armchair psychologists diagnosed her as a psychopath because she managed to kill a bunch of aliens.
Confuse, Confuse
I don’t think people really bridged the whole gap. The lack of dialogue wasn’t a gimmick, it was a storytelling technique. The only spoken, discernible dialogue was Brynn apologizing in her parasite-induced projected reality. That was a decision. That’s like being in a dark warehouse with a spotlight illuminating just the exit. Further, I sort of get that the aliens let Brynn live her days out with the other possessed humans was a sort of narrative comeuppance, and allowed her to rejoin society after forgiving herself, but I can’t really figure out why the aliens would do that. Just fuckin’ kill the broad. She merced like four aliens, bro. She’s a complete hazard. Enemy of the state. Why is she still roaming around? But of course, that would go hand in hand with her personal tragedy where she accidentally kills her friend, and basically gets to run around free in society anyways.
So I get it. The movie is interesting and it’s unique and it’s fresh, but I don’t think it’s neat. It drags on for a long time, pointlessly. The finale fits thematically, and has its own flavor of ‘door opens on its own before the credits roll’ from the other, more generic films I’d seen prior. But it’s not exactly logical. It’s not a dealbreaking issue, and it’s certainly worthy of discussion enough to draw me out of my retirement like Tom Brady. I’m on the fence about this film. Thus,
YMMV.
You can currently stream No One Will Save You on Hulu. Which just raised its prices.
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