Bringing a new twist to the alien invasion subgenre isn’t exactly an easy task – the iconography of UFOs and extraterrestrials has become so ingrained in society we even have emojis to represent both. With the new thriller No One Will Save You, it seems like writer-director Brian Duffield didn't try to reinvent the flying-saucers-and-men-from-Mars wheel. Instead, he borrowed ingredients from past interplanetary incursions, threw them in a blender, and arranged the results around a game Kaitlyn Dever. And for 45 tense minutes or so, this strategy pays off pretty well – before No One Will Save You becomes both an action film and yet another onscreen allegory that is "about grief, actually."
Dever plays Brynn, a young woman living alone in her family home. She leaves this isolated farmhouse deep in the woods only to mail the dresses she sells for a living and to visit her mother's grave. She never speaks to anyone, but she does write letters to her friend Maude. It's clear early on that Maude is actually deceased as well, and that Brynn may have had something to do with her death.
Awakened by something going bump in the night, Brynn discovers that someone else is in her house – and they're not from this world. She’s able to successfully fight off this first intruder, but over the course of the next day and night she must fend for herself against a growing horde of attackers.
Duffield successfully creates tension on the first night by keeping his camera focused solely on Dever, whose face is almost always awash in a beautiful blue light. The space invader, an archetypal gray with big black eyes, is mostly only seen in shadows and silhouettes; props to cinematographer Aaron Morton for filming so many night scenes in such a way that while the darkness remains eerie, the action always remains visible. Staging Brynn's close encounter like a home invasion thriller in this first sequence mostly works, as long as you suspend a bit of disbelief. It's best not to question why these beings can manipulate energy to burst open thick wooden doors, but wouldn’t pull the same trick while Brynn hides behind a refrigerator door. (Probably because doing so would cut the delicious, old-school heebie-jeebies that Duffield is trading in.)
Duffield’s mishmash of better films eventually wears thin. After the direct homages to Close Encounters of the Third Kind, Signs, Fire in The Sky, The Faculty, and the 1978 version of Invasion of the Body Snatchers, No One Will Save You becomes so overly derivative you’ll wish you were watching any of those other films instead. The suspension of disbelief also becomes harder to bear when Brynn winds up in hand-to-hand combat with one of the little gray men. The series of plot and thematic decisions regarding Brynn’s grief and guilt that follow are laughable, breaking the transfixing spell of the first half. For her part, Dever is a wonder, giving an almost silent film-style performance. She only utters one line of dialogue across the 90-minute runtime, and otherwise relies solely on her expressive eyes to keep the audience in sync with Brynn’s emotional state – whether she's mourning her friend or in a state of terror.
The arrival of additional aliens yields mixed results. You can't go wrong with the classic black-eyed gray, but the more of them you see and the more Duffield has them do, the more the terror they evoke gives way to unintentional laughs. There's a reason the tension in Jaws remains so palpable throughout that Spielberg classic. It's unfortunate it's one of the few movies Duffield didn't borrow a technique from.
I applaud the film for never really explaining why the aliens are invading or why they’re spending so much time chasing Brynn – in these kinds of movies, it really shouldn’t matter. It is unfortunate, though, that Duffield felt the need to visually over-explain the source of Brynn’s grief and ostracization, because his use of symbolism to demonstrate her reaching a place of internal forgiveness is actually pretty interesting (and a little bit disgusting). The very final sequence also undercuts that emotionality, and almost feels like a wacky, studio-mandated, upbeat ending of another era.
