No One Will Save You
What an ominous title, and a well deserved one. At no point during the film did anyone attempt to save her.
No One Will Save You is a 2023 horror/thriller about a young woman, Brynn, who lives on her own. One fateful night, hostile aliens land in her yard. She must figure out how to survive and escape with her life before they claim it.
The care and craftsmanship put into this film is evident. The cinematography is great. The camera places you in Brynn’s shoes from the moment the aliens land. It was very hard to look away from the screen. Additionally, this film is anchored by an incredible performance from Kaitlyn Dever, who is able to command the screen while only speaking a handful of words.
That’s right, there is very minimal dialogue in this film, unless you count some off-screen mutterings of background characters. I do not. It’s truly impressive how much characterization is put into the character of Brynn considering she only speaks during one scene. It isn’t quite as tense as 2018’s A Quiet Place, but it does a similar gimmick and commits to it much better.
It’s slightly unfair of me to call it a gimmick. The story reasons for the characters not talking are there: Brynn is a pariah in her town. No one likes her – most people can’t even look at her – because of an unknown event in her past that has to do with the death of her childhood best friend, Maude. When she even has the heart to visit town, she is shunned.
While there are certainly other actors in this film, it is essentially a solo character study of Brynn. The camera follows her the entire film, her face telling the story most of the time through intense expressions and – more than anything – emotion. I’m not super familiar with the work of Kaitlyn Dever, but she excelled here, and I’d be surprised not to see her everywhere in the future.
There were multiple types of aliens in this one. There were the humanoid ones, the little ones, and the giant freaky ones, and each had their moment to be the scariest one, with different strengths and weaknesses that Brynn had to figure out as she fought for her life throughout the film.
I thoroughly enjoyed this film. By the end it had maybe gone on a little too long, but all-in-all this was a solid thriller that kept me on the edge of my seat and left me on a note where I’ll be thinking about it for a long time.
I’ll give this a solid 7/10. I came in with almost no expectations and it blew me away. Sure, it’s weird and a bit uncanny at times, but this contemporary Home Alone with aliens manages to suck you in and remind you that at the end of the day, in a battle against aliens, sometimes the real enemy is your eternal loneliness.
