The Big Picture
- No One Will Save You goes against expectations, starting off with intense alien encounters right from the beginning, keeping viewers engaged and on the edge of their seats.
- The film subverts the typical alien invasion movie formula by staying focused on its protagonist, Brynn, and her personal journey of redemption and survival, rather than expanding to a worldwide or governmental perspective.
- Despite its thrilling and terrifying alien encounters, No One Will Save You remains a small and quiet story, centered on Brynn’s pain and determination to live, ultimately making it a unique and unforgettable viewing experience.
The film community has been abuzz this past week about writer and director Brian Duffield‘s alien invasion shocker No One Will Save You. It might have gone straight to Hulu (it should have been in theaters), but that didn’t stop it from feeling like a big movie. It works by going against expectations. What seems to be just another horror film about gray-faced aliens attacking Earth is so much more, leading to a great twist ending that we won’t give away here. No One Will Save You also works through its jolt of a beginning. There is no slow build here. Instead, we get right to it straight off the bat. Just a few minutes in and, bam, an alien is in our heroine’s house. Not only that, but we see it. Duffield grabs us by the throat from the get-go, and now that he has our attention, we have no choice but to be fully involved, leaning in as the film unfolds with all of its twists and turns. It was the perfect direction choice to make. Any other approach might have had audiences thinking they were seeing the same old genre movie when No One Will Save You is anything but.
Most Alien Invasion Films Start the Same Way
If you’ve seen one alien invasion flick, you’ve seen them all. We might be suckers for them, but they’re predictable. It’s like a slasher, with every trope seen coming a mile away. Your usual aliens-attack-Earth film is a slow burn of building tension. We meet our characters first. These are the people that are going to be running from the spaceships and explosions soon. There’s already some conflict going on. In 2005’s War of the Worlds, for example, Tom Cruise‘s Ray Ferrier is a crappy father and his kids don’t like him. We set that up so that later he can redeem himself by saving them.
As we’re following our cast of characters, little things start happening here and there. Pets go missing, people go missing, there are strange sightings of something unexplainable or even crop circles. M. Night Shyamalan‘s Signs did a great job at this. Other films, like Independence Day, give us the traditional viewpoint of the military or government. Odd things are beginning to happen across America. How will our leaders react once shit hits the fan? Can we trust them? The first act tells us. As that initial act comes to an end we get our huge inciting incident. The aliens attack, and now the rollercoaster, which has slowly been on the climb, drops into a frightening free fall. No One Will Save You doesn’t do that. The rollercoaster doesn’t climb but starts at the top of the hill, teetering for just a few short minutes, before taking the plunge.
‘No One Will Save You’ Is Tense Right From the Beginning
No One Will Save You takes the third act of Signs and instead makes it the beginning. It’s absolute intensity from the starting point. It’s a bold move that pays off. In today’s era, it also may have been a necessary one. Watching a movie at home on a streaming service opens us up to so many distractions. If we’re not watching it on our phone, our phone is in our hands while the movie is on our TV. No One Will Save You grabs the phone out of our hands and chucks it across the room. Social media and games are no match for what Brian Duffield has in store. The tense beginning is also needed because of one of the film’s tricks; there is almost zero dialogue. Imagine a movie with a first act that has no dialogue, and almost no characters, making us watch someone walking around doing errands all alone for 20 minutes. That’s not interesting. Even the most patient viewer would be tempted to check out. Duffield doesn’t hold our hand and point things out to us; rather, he pushes us into the nightmare and slams the door shut.
We do get a short introduction to our protagonist, Brynn (Kaitlyn Dever). She’s a young woman living in a big house all by herself. Her mother has passed on, and we see her writing a letter of apology to a friend. A trip into town shows that no one likes her. She doesn’t speak and she feels very lonely. We don’t know who Brynn is, but we know something unsettling is in her past. We don’t get a chance to find out what just yet, because as soon as Brynn gets home and goes to bed, the terror starts. We’re only at minute ten when she finds the front door to her house open in the middle of the night. There could have been a scene of nothing further happening, only for it to begin again the next night, but nope, it’s only a few seconds later that a shadow is seen running on the first floor. That shadow turns into a gray-skinned, black-eyed form barely seen at the bottom of the steps. If that’s not horrifying enough, there’s the chilling sound design, when Brynn is discovered and chased, of the presence’s footfalls running up the steps and over the hardwood floors. And then there it is. We don’t get a drawn-out tease, but a quick reveal of an alien. No One Will Save You doesn’t keep us or its protagonist in the dark. It shows us the monster, shaking us to the core. What follows are intense scenes of Brynn being chased and hiding from the monster. It’s a horror version of Home Alone, with the scene lasting an excruciating 12 minutes. What feels like the third act is just the beginning. We’re now glued to our seats, unable to fathom what could possibly happen next after all of that.
The Rest of ‘No One Will Save You’ Subverts Expectations
No One Will Save You could have gone anywhere following that insane beginning. Will the invasion go worldwide? Is this the part where the military comes in? We don’t get any of that. There is an expansion in scope, as we see multiple alien ships in the sky. We also meet more aliens of different sizes, and the townspeople become infected by alien hosts that live in their throats. The film evolves in that way without becoming too big and incomprehensible.
Instead, the story still stays small and quiet, centered only around Brynn’s point of view. We also learn more about her tragic backstory throughout. She is a woman who has gone through immense trauma, but it has also prepared her for this moment. She has the strength to fight, to prove to herself that she’s a good person deserving of life, and to redeem herself for past mistakes. Brian Duffield gave us such a thrilling opening, giving us everything we thought the movie would be, all jammed into first scenes, so he could spend the final two acts subverting our expectations. That doesn’t mean that No One Will Save You tricks us, promising an alien invasion movie, only to become something else. The film keeps its premise intact, with more terrifying alien encounters, but it keeps everything insular, with the story staying just as much about Brynn’s pain and determination to live as the little gray men themselves. We don’t see how the outside world reacts. We don’t get an explanation. We don’t get anything but the here and now. In No One Will Save You, Brian Duffield takes a small, personal story and makes it an epic nightmare by showing us that anything is possible right from the start.
