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No One Will Save You Review
Image Credit: Hulu
Loading...NOTE: Spoilers Within For The New Hulu Flick No One Will Save You
As I continue my intrepid march towards 100 new release movies seen in 2023, I managed to catch a trailer for a Hulu original movie, No One Will Save You. It looked quite interesting, so I marked it on my calendar (September 22nd) and watched it after my Friday work day was complete.
(My next such targeted release is Totally Killer, coming October 6th to Prime)
The premise of No One Will Save You seemed quite promising. Kaitlyn Dever plays a young woman named Brynn, living as an ostracized pariah in her hometown. She lives her life in lonely silence as none of her neighbors want anything to do with her. And then one night she is set upon by attacking aliens! Living amongst folks who don’t seem to care if she lives or dies, how will Brynn manage to survive?
What the trailer did not prepare me for–what I did not even notice until around the HALF AN HOUR MARK OF THE MOVIE because god damn can I be oblivious at times–is that the movie has virtually no dialogue. You get, I believe, one unimportant spoken line early on from a mailman, and then a little bit more speaking very late, but for the vast majority of the movie, no one talks to anyone else.
Even with the premise of Brynn being shunned, how does the movie pull that off?
Well, frankly, by betraying its own title and promise.
You see, Brynn barely interacts, or even comes into contact, with anyone else in her town. There’s an opening scene of her dropping off some mail, and a later scene of her considering going to the police after the first night of extra-terrestrial activity, but aside from that, Dever spends a solid 90+% of the movie either alone or with aliens. So she doesn’t have a lot of folks to bounce any thoughts off of.
I kept waiting for the promise of no one believing or wanting to help her to pay off, but the aliens attack early and often in this one, and the film quickly becomes Brynn vs The Grays, with her community barely even being a background bit in it all.
Which isn’t to necessarily say that is bad; it’s simply not what I was expecting! The movie trades on tension as Brynn faces encounter after encounter against the seemingly malevolent beings. Even her attempt to simply flee the town is thwarted by their looming omnipresence. Brynn runs until she can’t run anymore, then she fights when she has to. And when they finally get her dead to rights at the end… she has a different kind of struggle to face. Against both her attackers and her self.
TWO UPS AND TWO DOWNS
+ I feel like I constantly give an Up to actors or actresses, to the point where it’s becoming a bit of a shtick for me. But you can’t deny it here: Kaitlyn Dever is tasked with carrying this movie, and doing so in an almost handicapped kind of way since she doesn’t get to express anything through dialogue. And she easily succeeds. The combination of her presence, her physical acting, her emoting, and the movie’s shooting of her absolutely makes up for the lack of talking. She is magnetic.
+ The No Dialogue bit is pulled off effortlessly, and it doesn’t draw attention to itself by being too awkward about it or forcing moments for people to not speak. As I said, it was relatively late in them movie before I even realized it was a thing, and that was after BOTH of Brynn’s trips into town… the scenes where I should have realized no one was talking!
Having a feature length film without characters conversing–even not just to each other; I for one would have been blathering to myself like a fool in Brynn’s situation–can’t be easy to do, but No One Will Save You makes it look like it is.
– This movie is DARK. Not thematically; not really. But… like Game Of Thrones season eight dark. Even sitting in the relative dimness of dusk in my living room, it was hard to see what was going on at points. Entire scenes passed with my squinting at my television and thinking “What am I supposed to be seeing here?”. I’m not sure where this penchant for making things we watch too dark to see came from, but I bet it’s by the same guy that brought us “Set the volume so they can’t hear the dialogue of anything, but also so action sequences blow them out of their house”. Fuck that guy!
I do feel like the darkness is an excuse to hide the aliens as much as cinematically possible, and I appreciate that, especially when the film really doesn’t skimp on showing you the creatures at other moments. So I assume it’s all budget constraints to help as much as it can. But still… I oftentimes like to SEE what I’m WATCHING, you know?
– Okay, I basically gave this away in the summary, but I’m circling back to it here to confirm it as a Down: I wanted a lot more of the premise of the flick than what we ultimately got. I wanted more of Brynn and the townsfolk, with the latter showing their disdain for her. I wanted a better payoff to the title, showing me that those around her refuse to help her no matter how much evidence she has just because of the disdain they carry for her. I really felt like the movie made a promise it didn’t really intend to keep. Or it got so married to its no-dialogue gimmick that the writers and director quickly realized they couldn’t have their cake (the premise) and eat it, too (the gimmick). The two simply did not mesh.
I feel like… just call your film something else then! It would have been so easy.
Oh well.
