NO ONE WILL SAVE YOU - Mark Reviews Movies

No One Will Save You, 20th Century Studios

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Review by Mark Dujsik | September 22, 2023

With No One Will Save You, writer/director Brian Duffield whittles down a thriller to its bare necessities in many regards, save for at least one significant element. Here's a movie about a young woman, alone and vulnerable and without anyone to help her, in a remote cabin, facing off against a threat wants to harm or kill her. In Duffield's mind, that's really all we need to know to care about this character's fate and all he needs in order to create suspense.

In many ways, the filmmaker is correct. We can relate to Brynn (Kaitlyn Dever), the lonely 20-something who finds herself dealing with isolation and, then, immediate terror. Who among us hasn't been alone in our own home in the middle of the night, heard some unexpected and mysterious noise, and become torn between wanting to know what it is and dread that it might be exactly the worst we could fear? Obviously, this story does confront Brynn with the worst, although it's probably not what many people would expect to find after hearing something going bump in the night.

The key here is how stripped down Duffield's premise and, for the most part, execution of this tale are. We follow Brynn throughout, and apart from some characters who barely interact with her and the multiple threats she encounters over the course of the movie, there is no other character of much note here.

Even more than that, Brynn doesn't speak, beyond one repeated line of dialogue in the third act that offers a redundant explanation of the core of her character. She rarely has the opportunity to do so, given that Brynn lives alone and is basically a pariah in the small town near her home. The chances when she could or does want to speak here are interrupted, too, either because no one wants to talk to her or because that threat eliminates the possibility of her communicating with the outside world.

More to the point, though, Duffield suggests that his protagonist doesn't need to talk for us to understand her, sympathize with her, and determine each and every thing she's feeling or planning to do at any given moment. He's right, of course. A lot of that amounts to the filmmaking, which gives us a clear sense of the geography of the house and the area surrounding it, as well as ensuring that every action here possesses a motive, a goal, some kind of obstacle or obstacles getting in the way, and clear sign of when Brynn has or hasn't accomplished what she has set out to do.

The rest of it comes down to Dever's performance. She has to communicate each of the many steps Brynn takes to survive over the course of a day or so and give us a sense of the underlying emotional damage of this character—all of that without uttering a single word through the overwhelming majority of the movie. It's impressive work, especially because the performance is so natural that we might take for granted just how much Dever is doing at every moment she's on screen. If we were to see through the performance, we would see through Duffield's narrative and formal trickery. We don't, so except for the way that the filmmaker undermines his own game, we don't.

All of this gets us to the movie's primary challenge to its setup, which mostly revolves around Brynn running away from and hiding from and confronting a string of threats in and around her house. The process of it all is sound, as Brynn has to avoid making any kind of noise, find safe places to take cover, and figure out a way to fight back when she absolutely needs to. Duffield uses shadows, the layout of the house, and maybe a few too many close calls to pull that off, and then, there's the sound itself, which creeps around Brynn or rushes toward her, as unseen or known threats hunt for the young woman.

The main challenge, though, is in Duffield's choice of a threat. They're aliens—little and sometimes not-all-little gray men, who have come to Earth in flying saucers with an unclear goal and powers or technology that seem to adapt to the requirements of the plot. It's difficult to buy, particularly because the movie does such fine work grounding Brynn in grief and guilt, while also building tension out of mundane things such as creaking floorboards, footsteps in relation to our protagonist, and shadows moving along walls and through windows.

It might seem a bit unfair to call a key component to this story a miscalculation, but anyway, here we are. At a certain point, it becomes less important what Brynn does, because the aliens become increasingly capable of countering her tactics, thanks to powers and technology that come out of nowhere, and the story has to focus more on whatever it is these creatures are planning. There's also the practical matter that the visual effects, while serviceable, aren't convincing enough to, well, convince us that any of these aliens are actually physical entities.

In other words, the threat of No One Will Save You might simply be too big for the movie's minimalistic aims. It's a neat experiment, but with its heightened extraterrestrial conceit, Duffield works against the suspenseful core of this story a bit too much.

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