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.

In short: Booksmart (2019)

I’m often making fun of actors turning directors, but that’s more on account of the Tom Cruises and Edward Nortons of this world who hijack other peoples’ films to stroke their own egos, notwithstanding the limits of their own talents, than those actresses and actors who come upon their direction work because they actually care about the art of filmmaking.

Olivia Wilde’s tale of the adventures of teens Amy (Kaitlin Dever) and Molly (Beanie Feldstein) on the last night before their high school graduation, who try to for once have a traditionally teenage fun time instead of being the teacher’s pet kind of nerd who only thinks about school, certainly suggests an actress who cares and understands said art. At first, the film seems to be a well-made and a bit lightweight but very likeable and genuinely funny coming of age comedy with a tendency to make fun little digressions into weird directions (Molly’s and Amy’s drug fantasy has to be seen to be believed), but the longer the film goes on, the clearer it becomes that Wilde is also portraying the easiness of emotional shifts and shifts in perspective common in people of our heroines’ ages, so there are moments of quiet tragedy and genuine hurt, of awkwardness and sudden insight when every character who starts out as a classic teen movie type turns out to have another facet and a different side. Wilde portrays these shifts and the opening of her characters to the complexity of other human beings as well as the downsides of their own friendship with sympathy and insight, particularly in the film’s more painful sequences, pretending the film’s a nicely flowing series of episodes when it is actually very thoughtfully structured. There’s some rather more obvious great filmmaking on display too, like the way the scene in which Amy gets her heart broken starts from a feeling of utter contentment and wonder and just flows away from there.


The whole thing is also beautifully played by Kaitlyn Dever and Beanie Feldstein, who pull off all of the film’s tonal shifts with ease, keeping likeable and understandable (which is something better than merely being relatable), and working through the humour, the hurt and the weirdness.