Film Review: No One Will Save You (2023)

Alien-nation

Kaitlyn Dever in No One Will Save You

I knew next to nothing about this movie going in- just that it was an alien home invasion horror story, an intriguing sounding mash-up. (And it was directed by rising genre star Brian Duffield, whose debut ‘Spontaneous’ is one of my favorite horror-comedies of the last few years).

Home invasion is one genre of horror that always, always leaves me unsettled, if not completely freaked out. Home is something most people consider sacred, and the violation of the sacred is what makes these films so terrifying. (Think of brutal classics of the genre like ‘Funny Games,’ ‘The Strangers,’ ‘Straw Dogs,’ and New French Extremity offerings like ‘Martyrs’ and ‘Inside.’)

For a long time, I wasn’t interested at all in invaders from outer space, but after a subterranean alien presence crept its way into my latest (fiction) work- in-progress, and after watching Jordan Peele’s bizarre, inventive film ‘Nope,’ a cosmic horror/Western, I’ve developed a renewed interest in aliens in horror.

So ‘No One Will Save You’ was calling my name. Ironic given that the movie, despite an intensely brooding and effective soundscape, contains almost no dialogue. (Which makes the five words that are uttered heavy with meaning- I’ve certainly never heard the word ‘uh’ employed to such great effect before).

‘No One Will Save You” relies entirely upon the superstar performance of actress Kaitlyn Dever. Dread, guilt, relief, grief, despair, joy, but mostly various striations of fear, ripple across her face. She is in nearly every frame of the film, and she acts the hell out of this mostly silent, intensely physical role.

In the film’s opening shot, the forest encroaches on a large but quaint-looking Craftsman-style house. Maybe I’ve just been feeling extra introverted lately, but Brynn’s life in the countryside appears pretty idyllic to me. She wears cute 1950s style dresses, adorns her hair with ribbons, dances, sews and crafts a tiny town of birdhouses in the middle of her living room. She cooks herself nice meals and eats them on the dock on her pond. Her life epitomizes the cottage-core aesthetic. And she sells her crafts online, so she only needs to leave her house to go to the grocery store and post office.

It’s clear from her mother’s grave in the backyard and the rudeness of everyone Brynn encounters in her short ventures into town that not all is right in her Instagram-worthy world, but she finds solace in her hobbies and the house she grew up in. As in all home invasion films, the house itself is a central character, and Duffield makes excellent use of the house’s nooks and crannies (and even its furniture and appliances) in the movie’s many action sequences.

Not even ten minutes into the movie, Brynn’s fragile peace is shattered when she awakens at night to an extraterrestrial visitor breaking into her home. The rest of this taut film is a nearly nonstop fight for survival, the action broken only by brutal flashbacks to the worst day of Brynn’s life (the death of her best friend). It soon becomes clear that the aliens want something more complicated than annihilation, leading to a very creative use of the “alien probe” trope.

The depiction of grief in this movie floored me. As someone who lost my own best friend just over two years ago, and who has struggled with grief every day since, I found ‘No One Will Save You’ intensely cathartic. In this traumatized country, grief horror as a sub-genre is rising in popularity. Monsters, ghosts, haunted houses- all are handy metaphors for loss, but where horror (the most visceral of genres) really excels is in its depiction of the ugly feelings, the soul-shredding anger, despair and insanity that can accompany intense grief (and that have no place in polite society).

(Stay tuned for a future post all about Grief Horror!).

Although the ending was a little silly (but upon re-watching I found I appreciated the note of black comedy more) and the actual depictions of the aliens were maybe not the most inventive, these criticisms feel like nit-picking when the overall effect of the film was so powerful and the acting, cinematography and production design were all so flawless.

In conclusion, I would highly recommend ‘No One Will Save You’ to horror lovers or anyone looking for an intense ride of a film.