Mark Reviews Movies: SAVE YOURSELVES!

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Review by Mark Dujsik | October 2, 2020

We may not know how humanity or the entirety of the world will end. Before it does happen, at least there's some, admittedly morbid, comfort in the knowledge that internet will provide us with some solid clues (There seem to be plenty of hints as of late) and maybe even a schedule. The setup to the central joke of Save Yourselves! is that a couple, struggling with adulthood and feeling disconnected in their relationship because of how connected they are to the online world, decides to go off the grid for some re-evaluation. The punch line is that, just as the two leave New York City, aliens invade the planet.

It's a clever gag, drenched in situational irony. We know something is wrong from assorted sights and sounds, unseen by the main character or dismissed because they don't have the information we do, such as objects falling from the sky and gunshots accompanied by screams in the distance and people disappearing or being killed just out of the protagonists' view. From the very start of the film, co-writers/co-directors Alex Huston Fischer and Eleanor Wilson let us in on the joke. The story, some text announces, takes place in "the year humankind lost the Earth."

The characters, obviously, have no clue. While they're caught up in renewed bliss or bickering about secrets that each of them might have kept from the other, the human race is on the brink of possible decimation or even extinction. Everything here feels simultaneously heightened and undermined, and in the very nature of that paradox, the filmmakers give us a comedy that exists with an absurd combination of down-to-earth matters and otherworldly threat.

Su (Sunita Mani) and Jack (John Reynolds) have been dating long enough that there's some routine domesticity in their lives together. Other friends are getting married, while they're still just living together, and having children, while they're at a point of thinking about someday talking about having one kid.

Su works a boring job, and we're never really sure if Jack works, given his devotion to a sourdough starter. As for romance, after starting to get frisky on the couch, the two are interrupted when Jack's cellphone buzzes. Immediately, the mood disappears, and both of them are just scanning their phones with a blank expression.

This won't do. Something has to change, and at a party, Raph (Ben Sinclair), an old friend of the couple, gives them some hope—since he completely re-invented his life after quitting a job in finance—and an opportunity. He's fixing up his grandfather's old cabin in the woods upstate, and it would be great if they spent a week there while it's unoccupied.

Su and Jack do go, agreeing to keep their cellphones off and their laptops at home. Everything seems fine, but we have seen what we've seen in the background and up in the sky.

Except as foreshadowing and for irony, none of that really matters near the beginning of the vacation, because Fischer and Wilson do wants us to get a solid understanding of Su and Jack's relationship—for sympathy, yes, but mainly for comedy. These two are funny, if broadly drawn, generational caricatures—stuck in certain habits (Su may have gone offline, but she has replaced it with a notebook filled with things she copied from the internet before leaving), embracing attitudes of all things organic and socially-aware, dismissing old-fashioned beliefs about all sorts of things (gender roles, what it means to be a man, and, as they have to confront once the aliens arrive, guns).

The portrayal here isn't cutting, because the filmmakers clearly do find these characters endearing and sympathetic, despite their quirks and self-involvement and obvious shortcomings when it comes to facing an extinction-level threat to the planet. Those good-natured jabs, combined with a real sense of these characters as individuals and a couple, serve as the reason the humor works through the first act and a bit more.

Once the aliens—furry, little things that Su dubs "poofs" (on account of their resemblance to a poofy footstool)—do begin to appear, the humor expands. We get the actual jokes about how ill-prepared these two are, try as hard as they may. We get the dissonance of Su and Jack still bickering about their relationship (They argue about how they could have been rescued, if only Su had been honest about cheating with the no-phone rule) and debating assorted social and political issues, even as the poofs get closer and closer.

Fischer and Wilson also display some imagination in the physical and conceptual depiction of the aliens. They appear harmless, but details about them emerge, such as their affinity for ethanol and their long, quick-as-a-dart tongues, which help them swing to and fro, while also, well, having other, more deadly capabilities. As the couple's situation continually proves that things could always be worse, things do get worse.

Save Yourselves! works as a biting satire of modern life, as an observant but amusing study of a relationship under duress, as a science-fiction comedy that values creativity over spectacle, and as a kind of touching and hopeful parable about staying close to and embracing the ones you love. The world may be a mess and may seem to be becoming messier with every day and every new challenge, but at least and in the end, we have each other.

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