Review: "No One Will Save You" is smart, soulful horror with a knockout lead performance

All hail Kaitlyn Dever, who doesn't even need dialogue to be great

Normally, I’d be annoyed to see a movie as good as Brian Duffield’s No One Will Save You released straight to streaming – it’s playing on Hulu right now, at least until Disney needs more tax write-offs – but as much as I’d love to have seen this in a theater, this is the rare case where I understand the logic. No One Will Save You is a strong and striking piece of work, boldly made and deeply felt, but it isn’t easy to describe, and it’s a bit challenging to digest. It’s absolutely a horror movie, a sort of haunted house piece with Roswell aliens in place of ghosts, but probably a bit too internalized and isolative (there’s only one character on screen for most of the run-time) to be easily marketable in that space; it has an attention-grabbing stylistic conceit, in that there are exactly five words of spoken dialogue across the entire 93-minute runtime, but there’s no in-universe high concept explaining this lack of dialogue, a la the echolocating aliens in A Quiet Place; and it’s weird and prickly in ways that will inevitably frustrate plenty of mainstream audience members, with a final half-hour that is increasingly abstract, interpretive, and defiantly non-literal, including an ending that would provoke a lot of angry chatter in the parking lot were this playing at the multiplex. Streaming is definitely the safer bet here, and there’s a good chance this builds a strong word of mouth amongst the exact kinds of viewers most likely to get on the film’s idiosyncratic wavelength.

I’m definitely one of them. I don’t know if No One Will Save You executes perfectly on its ambition or lands its thematic punches with total coherence, but I also don’t think it needs too. Duffield definitely fulfills the horror prerequisites of tension, fear, and occasional revulsion, but the film is more centrally concerned with immersing the viewer in a very particularly emotional atmosphere, one where the specifics matter less than the overriding sense of sadness, rage, and confusion. I think it does that very well, and even if I couldn’t tell you what, precisely, Duffield intended as the literal narrative takeaway of the closing scenes, I can tell you what they made me felt, how they unsettled me by refusing to give an easy sense of closure – let alone anything resembling absolution – to the film’s bigger questions, and that I felt motivated to sit down and write a review principally because the material stuck with me, rattling around in my head until I put some words on the page.

Well, that and my desire to sing the praises of Kaitlyn Dever, the only actor on screen for most of the film, and the reason I decided to watch it in the first place. Dever is only 26, and give or take a Dear Evan Hansen, she’s displayed a remarkable aptitude for picking projects and seeking out interesting storytellers to work with, from her early work as a teenager on Justified to films like Olivia Wilde’s Booksmart. She’s a genuine talent, and No One Will Save You is the kind of calling card that’s going to leave a lot of people in this industry champing at the bit to work with her. There aren’t many actors, of any age, who could perform mostly solo and with only five words of dialogue arriving at the 69-minute mark and still manage to illustrate a fully realized character. It’s genuinely remarkable how effortless the first ten minutes or so of this film feel in sketching out this character, Brynn, a lonely girl reeling from two major losses and an unspecified but deeply felt sense of guilt and self-loathing. Duffield holds the camera on Dever as she practices smiling and emoting in the mirror before taking a day trip into town, and it’s basically all he needs to get the audience on board – Dever can do that much with that little, a skill the film relies on time and again. There’s a shot about halfway through the movie, just after Brynn has gotten one over on one of the alien invaders stalking her house (no spoilers, but the scene involves fire), and the reaction shot Dever gives – this unexpected but deeply human mix of exasperation, fleeting laughter, pain, fear, and then doubled resolve – gives us more than an entire internal monologue running over the whole movie ever could.

I love the title. No One Will Save You. It is, on its own, strikingly direct, a title you could apply to any number of horror movies – Halloween, Alien, The Shining, The Thing, basically anything with any degree of isolation and a murderous entity – but one nobody has claimed before. Within this film specifically, I think it works on two levels: First, it’s a cheeky reflection of the film’s no-dialogue conceit, which more than anything else works to focus and disorient the viewer, giving us nothing to hang on but the visuals on screen, the environmental sounds, and Joseph Trapanese’s moodily intense score. Nobody is going to come in and tell you what this all means; Brynn is never going to start making quips to take the edge off, or stare into the middle distance and soliloquize about how fighting the deadly aliens reflects her struggles with guilt and grief. No One Will Save You. You just have to watch the movie, pay attention to Dever’s performance and the cinematic language, and vibe with it, letting the uncomfortable emotions simmer and build without the pressure-valve release dialogue often provides. I don’t know if Duffield wanted to make a film without dialogue and then built a story around that challenge, or realized as he conceived this story that it would be more compelling if he stripped speech out entirely, but either way, it works; we are as stranded in the feelings and atmosphere the movie conjures as Brynn is, with no one to save us.

Second, the title works as a thematic summation of the movie’s central allegory about grief and guilt. This is not at all a new idea to build a horror or sci-fi movie around; Alex Garland’s Annihilation, Ari Aster’sMidsommar, and Jennifer Kent’s The Babadook, to name just a few, are also films about women struggling with loss and remorse who start out in patterns of avoidance and gradually realize that gnawing, omnipresent pain is never going to go away on its own. The only way out is through. No One Will Save You. And so they eventually stand up and start fighting back, literally and figuratively. Duffield’s film is absolutely part of this canon, and what makes the film special is the particular way it expresses this idea, through its silence and its increasing abstraction and the bottomless humanity of Dever’s performance.

That said, I think this film avoids the ‘oops, all allegory’ syndrome that sometimes bogs down genre fair when it’s committed to communicating a big idea via the fantastical threat; Jordan Peele’s Nope, for instance, was one I found hard to interpret or enjoy except on the specific 1:1 bits of symbolism served up. No One Will Save You works on a visceral level as horror; it’s never virtuosic, but it’s solidly and smartly made, delivering real suspense without ever resorting to easy shocks, and it conjures some truly great, haunting images when making full use of the widescreen frame and the film’s environment. It earns the abstraction of its final act, and adequately conditions the viewer for an ending that is hard to read or interpret literally, but feels poignant and pointed in ways that make the journey very much worth the destination. This is a special little movie, with a must-see central performance, and I hope it finds an audience on Hulu; certain viewers are going to feel like this was designed in a lab to frustrate them, but plenty of others will likely find it remarkable and even revelatory.

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