Brynn (Kaitlyn Dever) keeps to herself in her own corner of town.  She is mostly content working as a seamstress, constructing a model town, cooking and dancing by herself, but there is still a feeling of loneliness over her. She is like a ghost in her family home after her mother passed away and the loss of her best friend, Maude.  One night, she is woken up by an intruder in her house and as she goes downstairs to investigate, she discovers it is a silver-skinned, humanoid alien.  Fending off the attack, in the morning she goes into town to report the incident but finds that many in the town have been taken over by the alien race and she is now even more alone than before. 

Brian Duffield writes and directs No One Will Save You for Twentieth Century Studios as a Hulu exclusive.  The nearly wordless, 93-minute exercise places a lot of weight on Dever’s shoulder to deliver, and she excels in the physical, yet also very emotional role.  Intriguingly shot by Aaron Morton, the film will conjure up memories of Signs (2002) and 10 Cloverfield Lane (2016) given its subject matter and themes of isolation, but Duffield also opens up this scenario as a metaphor for grief, regret, and the challenges of forgiveness.  Mileage may vary if he is successful in this pursuit, but as a sci-fi thriller, he challenges himself to reimagine one of cinema’s oldest genres, and the result, while certainly supported on the shoulders of the most iconic tropes, creates a fresh vision that far exceeds the “straight to streaming” stigma attached to it. 

No One Will Save You’s claim to fame is its script; both in how sparse its dialogue is and how Duffield chose to portray that quiet in moments of action when one of the aliens approaches Brynn.  A stylistically formatted page was released online showing, margin-to-margin, the single phrase “shecantmove” over and over a’ la Jack Torrence’s manuscript pages that he furiously typed away at one snowy afternoon in The Overlook Hotel, but with even less negative space.  Interspersed, in bold, and sometime in the middle of the words were the Alien’s action.  Sending purists into a tizzy about what a writer “can” and “cannot” do on the page of a script, especially if they intend to direct, the page perfectly captures the tension achieved by the film which, at the heart of every screenplay, that is the goal. 

As for the ordeal which unfolds almost wordlessly, there are times when this conceit really pays off well and other moments where the confines make for some clunky and inorganic moments.  Duffield needs to lay the framework of his narrative somehow, and most of it is through a series of letters Brynn is writing to Maude, someone she was close to but is no longer here for reasons that remain a mystery for much of the run time.  The letters themselves are not the egregious part, but rather her limited interactions with the townspeople are where this wordless endeavor really begins to ask the audience to put their trust in Duffield and come along for the ride.  Sure, people can hold grudges in real life, but Brynn is treated like such a pariah that it becomes almost comical.  If this is Duffield’s commentary on the importance of forgiveness, it does not land all too well.  To give Brynn the benefit of the doubt, while she is proven capable of handling herself in confrontation, she seems rather to try and avoid it so she forgoes certain remarks back to her neighbors as they slight her, but the exercise really wears thin in that she does not even talk to herself as she goes about her daily life at home.  This complete rejection of all communication on her part makes it feel like she is happy with and enjoys her isolation instead of merely having learned to live with it.  Even just a few simple remarks – joy when she unwraps the schoolhouse model, a compliment to her cooking, a flirtatious quip as she dances alone – would greatly help contextualize this character as more than just someone with a heavy weight on her soul. 

For his finale, Duffield draws on some of the most iconic imagery available from traditional flying saucers, lanky aliens with humanoid form, and tractor beams that lift subjects up from the cornfields to be probed. He then really complicates his story, not in an unfollowable sense, but given the lack of clarity given the wordless nature, there is some nuance here that is certainty lost. Dever shows off some action chops as she fends off another two alien invaders, but eventually is overpowered and a parasite is placed inside of her. Under its influence, she begins to hallucinate what life would have been like had Maude still been present, but the vision becomes too intense, and Brynn breaks free. Back on Earth, she forces the parasite out of her which then transforms into a doppelgänger of Brynn and gives chase, leading the girl right into the tractor beam of an awaiting saucer. On the ship, she is subjected to probing and experiments and audiences finally get a hint of an answer as to why she has been so shunned by the community; as children, she and Maude got into a fight in which Brynn accidentally kills her friend when she hits her with a rock. In a way, it is satisfying as it is an answer, but overall, it is rather uninspired and dull. Without being able to discuss and convey the feelings of guilt, regret, and shared love of Maude, this pivotal moment, the emotional climax of the film, falls flat. It is no fault of Dever’s who does what she can and breathes more life into this script than most would be able to, but rather it is just the product of an experiment taken too far on Duffield’s part. 

No One Will Save You is, no pun intended, an alienating experience for those expecting a Friday night creature feature. There are enough neat elements to keep audiences engaged, and while the resolution does not fully satisfy after going along with Duffield for the ride, there are a handful of well-crafted and interesting sequences to enjoy. The implications of the ending can be read a number of different ways, none of which really seem to line up with character motivations, again, because we never have a clear idea of what Brynn is feeling. No One Will Save You is a bold and creative swing, taken a little too far to where it begins to fall apart, but if nothing else Dever excels in an oppressively lonely existence constructed by Duffield who never loses sight of the tone he was out to set.