One of the joys of movie genres is that they come with an established history. Every idea or scenario has a canon that shapes our expectations, and while filmmakers are free to ignore the past, many choose to engage with it openly. Genre films become a running conversation that audiences get to be a part of, and, with our responses, even moderate. No One Will Save You is an exciting new entry in that conversation. While not flawless in execution, it’s daringly creative — the kind of movie that will inevitably cause those who see it to start talking about other movies as a way of understanding it. It’s as much of an in-the-moment good time as it is worthy of lingering thought and discussion, and I hope that, from its position as a Hulu exclusive, it can make the splash it deserves.
The elevator pitch for No One Will Save You, written and directed by Brian Duffield, is all about genre: an alien invasion story treated like a home invasion horror movie. That’s enough to get plenty of people in the door. Kaitlyn Dever’s Brynn lives alone in a large, secluded house; though she grew up there, it’s clear her isolation isn’t entirely by preference. From the way she psyches herself up to go into town, and the way people meet her smiles and waves with icy glares, she has been ostracized for something from her past. While surely not great for a young woman’s mental health, it becomes an even bigger problem when something not of this Earth comes knocking, with decidedly violent intent. The movie’s title is Brynn’s horrifying truth, which might be echoing in her head throughout the nightmare that follows. No one will check on her, and it’s unlikely anyone would help even if they did.
Not that they could – as the No One Will Save You trailer makes clear, this invasion isn’t just targeting her house. The important thing to take from that detail is that Brynn, and therefore Dever, is really on her own. It’s a challenging position to put any actor in, but Duffield compounds it by having almost no dialogue, leaving his star to communicate only with her face and physicality (and, admittedly, a great deal of screaming). Not only does she sustain a connection with us through the emotional extremes of a horror protagonist, but she succeeds in developing Brynn into a complex character who only gets trickier to pin down as the film progresses. Because of Dever’s performance, we get to invest not only in Brynn’s survival, but her growth, and that’s a crucial reason why this lands as well as it does.
Eschewing dialogue is not only an acting challenge, and the filmmakers must tell their story without the easiest of tools at their disposal. Embracing this limitation clearly inspired a visual approach that’s both efficient and expressive, but it didn’t render the movie “silent” – sound is crucial to No One Will Save You. There’s so much to listen to that it might even take your brain awhile to register that no one has spoken an intelligible word. The movie strikes a good balance between the natural sounds of Brynn’s environment, crucial to sharpening the viewer’s awareness of her surroundings, and the inhuman soundscape the aliens bring with them. The first visitation, when the protagonist is caught completely off-guard, is the most effective in terms of horror. The slow reveal of her assailant keeps us hanging on every little noise, waiting for things to erupt in confrontation.
Later horror-forward sequences are a bit less impactful. Genre is clearly important to Duffield, and his film tries to give equal weight to its horror and science fiction elements, but Brynn’s foes are too powerful for the house-as-fortress aspect of a home invasion story to get its due. No One Will Save You‘s final girl is tenacious, instinctive, and lucky, but she isn’t much of a planner, and I missed that thrill of seeing a horror movie heroine outthink her pursuers. Unlike in A Quiet Place, a likely touchstone, these aliens lack rules for us to understand, and thus a clear weakness for Brynn to exploit. While her struggle for survival never loses tension entirely, without a path to victory for us to envision, the stakes of it diminish with each encounter.
Thankfully, the sci-fi section has a great deal more to offer — No One Will Save You becomes more visually and thematically ambitious as it transitions into its final act. To put it in referential terms, if the movie started off reminding me of A Quiet Place and Prey, I was eventually seeing echoes of Upgrade and Annihilation. The last act is thorny, giving Dever a wonderful arc to play and asking us to do some of the interpretive heavy-lifting. It has the kind of ending that’ll make you wonder how it ever survived the exec-laden journey from page to screen. If you’re at all inclined to enjoy films of this type, No One Will Save You is well worth your time.
No One Will Save You is now available to stream on Hulu. The film is 93 minutes long and is rated PG-13 for violent content and terror.
