In short: No One Will Save You (2023)

A young woman we’ll never really get to hear called Brynn (Kaitlyn Dever, carrying the whole movie on her shoulders effortlessly), lives in her own private fantasy at the outskirts of a small town where she’s ostracized for reasons the movie will get into eventually. Her dubious peace is disturbed when grey aliens begin invading her home.

Despite her pretty harmless appearance, our heroine is a fierce fighter against alien home invasions, but the aliens are no slouches, either, so escalation ensues.

Brian Duffield’s No One WIll Save You will probably be a bit of a marmite movie for most viewers thanks to the writer/director’s insistence on doing a few things that are thematically deeply appropriate but will drive the kinds of people who insist on their movies about alien invasions to be “realistic”, as well as those whose incessant search for “plot holes” doesn’t really care if a film is actually being true to its thematic concerns, batty.

And if this movie is one thing, it is being true to its themes. Even if it doesn’t quite seem so at first, there’s basically no decision on a script or direction level here that hasn’t been made in service of an emphasis on Brynn’s isolation, her ostracism and what comes out of it. Many things that feel like small, disconnected eccentricities, or artsy film school type gestures – like the decision to have basically no dialogue whatsoever even in a couple of scenes where people speaking would be more “realistic” – are actually feeding into the film’s central concerns.

This doesn’t mean No One Will Save You isn’t good as an alien home invasion movie. In fact, many of the scenes of Brynn’s struggles against her alien attackers are highly suspenseful, cleverly staged and only suffer somewhat from very mediocre CGI, and Duffield builds up a great deal of tension with simple measures. However, the film is perfectly willing to drop much of this for a final act and an ending that only make sense if you’re buying enough into its thematic interest you understand why and how the film’s ending is a happy end for Brynn, unlike for the rest of the world.