Regardless of what you may think of No One Will Save You (I think it’s not very good), it can’t be argued that it deserves its fate of being sent straight to Hulu, bypassing a theatrical run and thus forgoing what is obviously a serious box office payday. This is the second feature directed by Brian Duffield who is better known as a screenwriter of various black list scripts incouding 2015’s Jane Got a Gun. No One Will Save You is a very well-directed film, which is the best thing that a horror film can be. In order to calibrate the balance of tension, thrill, and narrative, it helps to have a filmmaking sensibility that both understands the power of camera placement and framing. It also stars Kaitlyn Dever, one of our very best young actors. So, that’s two things in this movie’s favor. Unfortunately, there’s not much more past that.

The hook of No One is that there is nary a wisp of dialogue in its 93-minute runtime. Five words total are spoken in the entire film, as long as we don’t count Dever’s many manic screams or pained, guttural groans. Duffield chooses instead to get creative in laying out the movie’s backstory. Brynn Adams (Dever) is a young seamstress who lives in a house isolated from a nearby town filled with an entire neighborhood of people who choose to shun her. The movie is mostly coy about why Brynn has been ostracized, but there are references to tragic incidents from her past that she is yet to fully process. Her mother – the only person in the town that provides her any company – has recently died. Brynn has gotten used to her solitude, and in fact appears to exist in an unsettling contentedness. That is until she’s visited by some unsettling creatures.

This is the meat of the movie: aliens have come down on her hometown and have started plucking off her fellow townspeople one by one.  By the skin of her teeth, Brynn is able to get away from one, then another, but each attempt at escape only underlines her new reality: not only have these aliens successfully invaded, but they have also come to possess the bodies of the few people that are still left behind. Like many of the horror films of this century, No One Will Save You metaphor-izes a lot of its protagonist’s past trauma, and as you’d expect, Brynn’s chances of surviving this harrowing new circumstance depend on her ability to confront the trauma she’s so successfully suppressed. Not much new here, and the way the script unveils this lacks any semblance of grace or subtlety.

This is a pretty bad script, propelled by an unnecessary gimmick and built upon a contrived foundation. There are a lot of scenes within this movie that work, and that’s a credit to Duffield’s ability to work through the incompetence of his own story, as well as Dever’s remarkable talent as an actor. You can see how a movie like this could have been a massive theatrical hit, and the movie has already found vociferous supporters in its straight-to-Hulu run. The movie works best when it’s at its most simple, but Duffield still insisted on overcooking his character’s exposition, as if being attacked by aliens isn’t sympathetic enough. I will give the movie credit for a clever ending. The degree to which it makes sense? I’m dubious. But it’s callous cheekiness is refreshing in the face of everything that came before it.

 

Written and Directed by Brian Duffield