Skylar Savarin

“No One Will Save You” is a science fiction horror film from writer/director Brian Duffield (“Spontaneous”). It stars Emmy-nominated Kaitlyn Dever (“Unbelievable,” “Dopesick”) as an isolated young woman named Brynn, whose home is suddenly invaded by aliens. The movie is notable for only containing five words of dialogue throughout its entirety.

I think that I might be in the minority here, as I didn’t really care for this movie. While I love Dever’s performance and some of the ideas presented throughout, “No One Will Save You” is a somewhat generic horror movie with some bad pacing and visual effects.

The idea of having a movie with little to no dialogue in this day and age is a pretty novel one, and I think it’s interesting that Duffield attempted something like that in this film. This sort of limitation forces filmmakers to be creative and find other ways to tell a story. “No One Will Save You” very much relies on both its visuals and the music to tell its story, and it does a pretty decent job of that.

Another strong element of this film is Dever’s performance, which carries pretty much the entire movie. I’ve loved her previous roles in “Short Term 12” and “Booksmart,” but I was curious to see if she could pull off a role with barely any dialogue. Thankfully, her facial expressions and body language go a long way of providing Brynn with a lot of emotional depth. It’s very clear throughout the film that she’s dealing with a lot of pain, which has been exacerbated by her being hated by the entire town … and also because of aliens.

Unfortunately, I found this movie to be pretty dull. Clearly that’s not going to ring true for everyone, as quite a bit of people seem to really enjoy “No One Can Save You,” but I just couldn’t even pretend to care about any of what was going on in the movie.
Part of that is due to how generic the aliens look in the film. If you’ve ever seen anything with aliens in them, then you probably already know how they look: gray skin, oval-shaped head, beady black eyes. If the only word they knew was “moo,” then they’d be almost exactly like the aliens from “South Park.” Not only that, but their jerky motion and mechanical-sounding noises make it seem like Duffield just stuck with literally the first idea for aliens that came to mind. It’s really disappointing to see such a dull depiction of aliens, especially after seeing the interesting spin presented in last year’s “Nope.”

The CGI was also unsurprisingly lacking, which can probably be attributed to its $22 million budget and direct-to-streaming release. Granted, I’ve definitely seen worse effects in movies with much higher budgets (“The Flash,” for instance), but I think that this can mainly be attributed to Duffield being a bit too ambitious for the money that he had. This movie would probably have been better if Duffield had written the script so that the aliens were mainly obscured.

Speaking of which, I think that the screenplay is part of why “No One Will Save You” didn’t really work for me. Duffield also wrote the screenplays for McG’s dark comedy slasher “The Babysitter” and William Eubank’s sci-fi horror “Underwater.” While I enjoyed both of those films to some extent, it was mainly due to their directors and not so much due to their scripts. It’s possible that I would have enjoyed this film more with a different writer and/or director involved, as I don’t know if Duffield was the best person to handle a movie like this.

All in all, “No One Will Save You” was pretty disappointing. Kaitlyn Dever’s performance was about as great as I could have expected, but she’s pretty much the only element of the movie that actually worked for me. I was pretty checked out for almost the entire movie, and I’d argue that this is much worse than just being a bad movie.
RATING: 5/10