The Invaders are Here, and No One Will Save You
“These are the invaders… who would take the giant step across the sky to the question marks that sparkle and beckon from the vastness of the universe only to be imagined.” -The Twilight Zone
The title tells you the crucial truth: you’re on your own out here. There’s no help to be found. It also tells you much more than the film itself will, so you better prepare for what’s ahead.
Brian Duffield’s No One Will Save You, released seemingly extemporaneously on Hulu, delivers perhaps the tightest ninety minutes of 2023. If you want a clean, sharp sense of thrill, then come spend an evening in Brynn’s house.
Brynn (Kaitlyn Dever) lives alone in a well kept, rustic home on the outskirts of a small town. Her solitude pervades beyond the walls of her house—we briefly see her in town, but don’t see her really interact with anyone. The few interactions we see are tense, hostile. There’s tragedy lurking in her memory, and it has left her isolated, though it’s not clear how much of that is due to ostracization and how much is from her withdrawal from the world.
She’s no recluse, however. We see her biking around town and enjoying life at home with records and hobbies and food; but she doesn’t have others to enjoy those things with, and she doesn’t really talk to anyone. In fact, she doesn’t talk at all—the biggest conceit of No One Will Save You is the lack of dialogue. The lack of lines makes the isolation more pointedly felt for both Brynn and the audience.
But Brynn won’t be isolated for long. Brynn’s town is the unwitting location for an extraterrestrial invasion, and one of these uninvited visitors shows up at her house. After a confrontation and chase through the basement and kitchen, Brynn incidentally kills the intruder. There is relief for the moment, but she soon discovers that her car won’t start, and the next day she realizes that much of the town has already been affected. Some people seem to be controlled by the aliens, through a form of coercive telepathy. After reckoning with the extent of the invasion, Brynn returns home and prepares for another showdown.
The effects are decent, if mostly beside the point. The visual effects are executed well enough that they aliens appear on screen often—this isn’t an indie horror that hides its monster. There are a handful of visuals that, if not outright frightening, are disturbing enough to unsettle. The effect of the aliens on the residents of the town leaves them contorting oddly, and the successive alien encounters introduce new, unexpected forms of the creatures.
The movie focuses its energy on the staging of each sequence, the action kicking up within the first ten minutes and hardly letting up. It’s not a long film, but it feels far shorter than its runtime given the constant pace of the scenarios Brynn must navigate. Duffield’s sequences and Dever’s acting arrest the audience’s attention through the near wordless film. Dever is impressive as she sells each of Brynn’s emotions. Terror, relief, hope, grief, and confusion all read clearly on her face.
For most viewers, No One Will Save You will probably carry immediate reverberations of Signs’ farmhouse standoff. But its deepest echo is found in an episode from the original The Twilight Zone series called “The Invaders.” In that story, a lone woman is similarly confronted by unwanted alien invaders, and she must fend them off in order to protect her mundane life. Likewise, both protagonists are silent—who would they even talk to in this trial? No One Will Save You builds on this idea briskly, proving itself a worthy descendant. (Between this and 2019’s The Vast of Night, I’m unabashedly here for a revival of The Twilight Zone’s ethos in the form of indie sci-fi.)
Where “The Invaders” hones a twist typical of Rod Serling’s series, No One Will Save You rotates on the axis of Brynn’s character. Viewed in one light, this could be seen as yet another horror movie about trauma. But that undersells the movie’s emphasis on character through action. It seems more so about the insufficiency of isolation: we can withdraw as much as we want, but at some point we must encounter others, be they friend or foe.
