A reclusive young woman fights for survival when her home becomes the
epicentre of an alien invasion.
Review by
Eric Hillis
Directed by: Brian Duffield
Starring: Kaitlyn Dever, Ginger Cressman, Zack Duhame, Geraldine Singer, Dari Lynn Griffin
If you're making a horror or thriller movie centred around a
protagonist's fight for survival, it's best to tell the viewer as little
as possible about that protagonist. This allows the viewer to easily
project themselves onto the character, along with their own apprehensions
and fears. All we know about Ben in
Night of the Living Dead is that he's trying to get through
the night without being bitten by zombies. Jamie Lee Curtis's Laurie in
the original
Halloween
is a decidedly average teenage girl who just wants to get through her
babysitting shift without getting butchered. There's absolutely nothing
remarkable about the family in Wes Craven's
The Hills Have Eyes. Of course, all of these films are open to subtextual readings, but on
the surface they're simple survival thrillers that never get bogged down
with any clunky character backstories.
If only the same could be said for today's survival thrillers. For some
reason, filmmakers are no longer content to simply deliver visceral
thrills, they have to make their movies about something else (usually
"trauma") on a textual level. Writer/director Brian Duffield's
No One Will Save You is a classic example of this current
phenomenon. For about its first two thirds it's a thrilling alien invasion
movie but it falls apart in a final act that pauses the thrills to explore
its protagonist's traumatic backstory. As a result, like so many of its
contemporaries, it doesn't feel so much like a standalone movie as an
extended Twilight Zone episode. I love
The Twilight Zone, but Rod Serling was well aware that such stories are best told in 30
minutes, and it's no coincidence that the weakest season of the show is
the fourth, which expanded the show to an hour long format.
Through some canny visual storytelling, Duffield tells us all we really
need to know about our heroine, Brynn (Kaitlyn Dever), in his film's
opening minutes. Without a word of dialogue we learn that she's a seamstress
who lives alone in a seemingly idyllic house by a picturesque lake, which
she inherited when her mother passed away a few years prior. We also
discover that she seems to suffer from some sort of agoraphobic fear of
running into other people: she dons a cap and sunglasses when she has to
head into town to post some mail and she cowers behind her car when she
spots some neighbours on her way home.
This is plenty of setup for the heroine of a survival thriller, and making
her an apparent agoraphobic seems like a clever touch. It's specific enough
to make the character stand out but not unique enough to distance her from
the audience. But then the dreaded traumatic backstory arrives in the form
of Maude, a childhood friend of Brynn's who seems to have been involved in
an incident that has turned the whole town against our heroine. Again, this
is an interesting touch, but the way Duffield holds back so many details
until the climax makes his film a frustrating watch, as the backstory
occasionally interrupts what is otherwise a very well made survival thriller
before ultimately derailing it completely.
The survival thriller element sees Brynn woken in the middle of the night
by some noise in her kitchen. Expecting to find some sort of vermin, or
perhaps a burglar, Brynn is shocked to see an alien stumbling around her
home. For the next hour or so No One Will Save You is a
relentlessly paced sci-fi thriller with some beautifully constructed
set-pieces. Like many viewers of my generation, when I watched
ET as a kid I found its opening scenes terrifying. At that
point I had no idea ET was a cuddly visitor from space who just wants to
phone home; I presumed the little shit had evil intentions. I'm guessing
Duffield had a similar experience, as Brynn's initial encounter with the
extra terrestrials here draws heavily on ET and Spielberg's
other alien visitation classic Close Encounters, with the lights of Brynn's home flashing on and off along with her record
player, and great big beams of Spielbergian light blasting through the
windows as flying saucers hover outside.
There are Body Snatchers elements as Brynn reluctantly heads to town for
help and realises that most of the townsfolk have become possessed by
cockroach-like creatures embedded in their throats.
Duffield takes various elements of classic sci-fi and mashes them together
into something that feels fresh and more intense than your average alien
invasion movie. Much of this is down to the film's almost complete lack of
dialogue. Commendably, Duffield doesn't cheat by having Brynn speak to
herself, or to a pet that's all too willing to listen to exposition, ala
I am Legend.
What No One Will Save You does have in common with
I am Legend (in this case Richard Matheson's novel rather than
the Will Smith vehicle), is the ambiguous suggestion that Brynn may not
actually be the heroine we think she is. It's never made explicitly clear
that the aliens have bad intentions towards her, and there's enough room to
make us wonder if she's actually Tom, rather than Jerry, in this
scenario.
Duffield makes great use of editing, camera movement, blocking and framing
to pull off some nerve-wracking set-pieces. Dever is no slouch either,
delivering an impressive non-verbal performance that forces her to use her
eyes to tell much of the story. The sound design plays a major role too,
adding some weight to CG effects that might have been more noticeably shoddy
without such effective use of sound.
What a shame then that the film sends a probe up its own ass in the final
half hour. Like a bad Shyamalan movie,
No One Will Save You suddenly decides it's no longer content
with simply being a damn good alien invasion thriller and gets lost in
unravelling Brynn's trauma. It's akin to the psychedelic nonsense that
derails the otherwise effective similarly themed 1977 sci-fi movie
Foes, and it ends with a punchline that might have been effective for a
Twilight Zone episode but in this case only serves to cheapen
the movie we've just watched and mostly enjoyed.
