NO ONE WILL SAVE YOU (2023)

Studio:   Hulu
Director: Brian Duffield
Writer:   Brian Duffield
Producer: Tim White, Trevor White, Allan Mandelbaum, Brian Duffield
Stars:    Kaitlyn Dever

Review Score:

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Summary:

A lonely young woman must defend her isolated home from a relentless extraterrestrial assault.

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Synopsis:     Show/Hide Spoilers

Brynn Adams, a socially ostracized young woman who lives alone in an isolated farmhouse, spends a day doing errands that include visiting her mother Sarah's grave and writing a letter to her dead best friend Maude Collins, whose tragic death Brynn blames herself for. While in downtown Mill River, Brynn goes out of her way to avoid an encounter with Maude's parents.

That night, an extraterrestrial creature breaks into Brynn's home. After surviving various strange phenomena, Brynn instinctively stabs the alien in its head and kills it.

Brynn returns to downtown Mill River the next day to report the alien encounter, but she stops cold when she runs into Maude's police chief father. Maude's mother spits in Brynn's face.

Brynn boards a bus to simply leave town. A passenger possessed by an alien parasite suddenly attacks. Brynn escapes outside where she observes entranced townspeople staring at ominous clouds forming overhead.

Back at her house, Brynn notices a slime trail indicating something crawled out of the alien carcass on her floor. A tractor beam soon levitates the carcass to pull it outside.

Another alien attacks Brynn. Brynn kills the creature and flees outside. Possessed by a parasite, the local mailman captures Brynn and takes her to an alien with spider-like appendages. Brynn narrowly escapes a tractor beam that tries pulling her into the sky. The alien pursues Brynn, but she kills it by trapping it inside a car that she blows up.

Another alien attacks Brynn inside her house. Frozen by a light beam, Brynn is helpless to stop the alien from putting a parasite down her throat. The alien symbiosis causes Brynn to experience a vision where Maude is still alive. Despite the elated sensation it gives her, Brynn apologizes to Maude and pulls out the parasite to return to reality.

A doppelganger pursues Brynn into a forest where she eventually kills it. A beam then sucks Brynn into the sky. Surrounded by aliens while aboard their spacecraft, Maude has a flashback that shows a childhood fight where she struck Maude with a rock that inadvertently killed her and led to Brynn being shunned by the town. After conferring among themselves, the observant aliens send Brynn back to the ground.

Brynn returns to an idyllic Mill River where possessed townspeople welcome her warmly and dance while Brynn smiles happily. Several saucers are seen hovering overhead.

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Review:

Certain films sometimes score low on a subjective scale, though their technical achievements can be appreciated far more on an objective level. Writer/director Brian Duffield's "No One Will Save You," a widely praised frightener that's cleverly crafted yet not necessarily hot enough to heat everyone's cup of tea, can be one such film.

"No One Will Save You" delivers home invasion horror where the intruders doing the invading are aggressive extraterrestrials from outer space. A bigger hook than that is the movie is almost completely free of dialogue, literally only two sentences are spoken, and it's pretty much a singular showcase for just one actor. Taken as a compelling creative experiment, it's easy to see why a student of cinema might want to dissect its construction again and again. Yet once you know how its simple story plays out and have already seen everything that happens, I'm not sure why it would be worth watching more than once as pure entertainment.

There may not be much said out loud, but written words sneakily contribute to the lone leading lady's characterization while also shaping her tragic background. From tombstone inscriptions to regular letters she pens to a dead former friend, we quickly learn how oppressive the grief is that makes her remote country home feel even more like a monument to isolation.

Despite the deaths defining her life, Brynn's mind protects her by letting Brynn live an imaginary existence of sorts. With her maturity partially frozen in happier childhood memories, Brynn maintains youthful interests like the miniatures hobby she shared with her mother and sewing homemade clothes. Willfully turning one blind eye to the ostracization stemming from her unfortunate role in BFF Maude's passing, Brynn takes routine trips into town where she waves at disapproving neighbors who pointedly refuse to return her smiles. She's resilient, yet Brynn seems resigned to a punishing fate of loneliness she thinks she deserves for Maude's demise.

"No One Will Save You" paints a fairly full portrait of Brynn by the time an alien enters her house in the dead of night about 10 minutes into the runtime. Brynn survives this harrowing encounter by stabbing the creature in its head, leaving its carcass dead on her front room floor. But this is barely the beginning of an oncoming invasion, and Brynn's humble home unfortunately sits in the center.

Still shocked and confused the next morning, Brynn rushes downtown to report what happened to the authorities. She doesn't get far. If Brynn forgot Maude's father is the police chief, she's reminded of how much she's hated when Maude's mother spits in her face. Truly, no one in this town will save her, which means Brynn has to survive her ordeal alone.

Even if they were willing to help Brynn, no one can anyway. These aliens come with a parasitic piece that crawls down people's throats, possessing them to become controllable puppets. Now it's really Brynn versus the world, or two different worlds to be precise.

"No One Will Save You" demonstrates the kind of concept that would have fascinated me from an "I wish I'd thought of that" perspective back in my film study days. Inventive moviemakers aching to make a mark are constantly fighting for ideas that allow them to create something cool in spite of common constraints like short shooting schedules, limited location access, a small cast, and an even smaller budget. "No One Will Save You" uses each of those elements as an asset to design a scaled-back story that thrives on shortcomings normally considered negative for most movies.

On a narrative level, however, it's hard not to see "No One Will Save You" as nearly 90 minutes of one person panting, running, hiding, crawling, panting, running, and hiding some more. Enough variation exists in individual scenes, such as having Brynn dispatch enemies in different ways or experience hallucinatory visions that fill in backstory blanks, so repetitiveness doesn't become exhausting. At the same time, the script's thinness shows through those cracks, making for a movie that's engaging in the moment without ever elevating into an evergreen experience.

As always, individual mileage will vary depending on whose personal tastes sit behind the wheel. For me, I've come to the conclusion that Kaitlyn Dever's performance as Brynn is intermittently interesting, but not exactly complex. That sentiment sums up "No One Will Save You" overall. It's an effort whose technical execution is objectively exceptional. How well it subjectively satisfies as a story, on the other hand, is an entirely separate matter.

Review Score: 55

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