No one can save No One Will Save You from itself

Distribution Service: Hulu
MPAA Rating: PG-13
Reel Rating: 2 out of 5 reels

Disclaimer: This review contains spoilers!

I was very excited to see No One Will Save You. The trailer was amazing and promised a high-stakes alien thriller with minimal dialogue and maximum excitement. For the first forty minutes, it did just that and seemed destined to be one of my favorite films of the year.

Unfortunately, someone decided the film had to be profound and important. It quickly nosedived into artistic stupidity until it crash-landed into little more than a poorly written Twilight Zone episode. What a disappointment.

Byrnn (Kaitlyn Dever) is living every introvert’s dream. Despite only being in her mid-twenties, she resides in a huge, immaculately kept house alone with a wide array of hobbies and a thriving Etsy business making vintage-styled dresses. She appears to be the town pariah, rarely venturing out of her house and despised by everyone, despite her cheery disposition. One night, she is awoken by a noise and sees an intruder has entered her dwelling.

Lacking a gun or an alarm system, she opts to hide from this unwanted guest. Nevertheless, he finds her, and she – to her horror – discovers it is an alien being of the classic grey type. After an intense struggle, she manages to subdue her attacker, but it is only the beginning of a series of bizarre and terrifying events.

The first act of No One Will Save You is one of the best exercises in Hitchcockian horror in recent memory; it is light years ahead of the jump scare milieu standard in the genre today. Driven by pure adrenaline, Brynn weaves her way into and out of rooms, behind closets and chairs, trying desperately to avoid the entity. At first, the audience just sees shadows, then a fuzzy profile with weird noises, until finally the feet are revealed, making clear this is not a human.

Eventually, she makes her way into town, only to find that nobody is interested in her plight. Director Brian Duffield — who also wrote and produced the film — expertly combines light, sound, and camera positions to create an intense feeling of dread and loneliness. Indeed, no one will save her.

Suddenly and unexpectedly, it seems like Duffield himself was abducted, and No One Will Save You was replaced with an off-brand version that only appears human. Eventually, Brynn is captured by the aliens, who probe her mind and reveal that she killed her best friend – and the daughter of the police chief – during a fight when they were children. No one, including herself, has forgiven or forgotten.

Things grow more and more bizarre from there. Before the end, Byrnn will have swallowed an amoeba-like creature the size of a baseball, killed her clone, and featured in an intergalactic zoo.

It’s clear Duffield is grasping desperately at something more, turning a compelling invasion narrative into a stupid art piece. Could Brynn’s happy ending at the conclusion be a sign that it’s better to live in bliss as a prisoner than misery in freedom? Could the murder of her clone be the killing of her past sin?

No larger meaning is easily discernable, but plenty have taken the bait. Stephen King called it “bright, daring, and involving.” Guillermo del Toro went on a bizarre rant, drawing tenuous parallels to a myriad of Catholic concepts, including redemptive suffering, Jonah and the whale, the Book of Job, and even the Eucharist.

Um…no. Sometimes, not only is “a cigar just a cigar,” but it’s much better as a cigar than anything else.

No One Will Save You is a classic example of a good-thing-gone-wrong. If Brynn had simply attacked the aliens, found a way to dispose of them, and spread the word, it would have been a hundred times better. Instead, her life is left trapped and unresolved, much like the viewers that endure this movie.