Over the past few weeks, I’ve been hearing excited reports about a new horror movie streaming on Hulu and directed by Brian Duffield, who is making his debut in an underrated dark comedy. Spontaneous. No one will save you it’s a tense movie about a home invasion and an alien invasion in one movie, but its most striking feature is that it has (by my count) only one real line of dialogue.
Deal
Twenty-year-old Brynn (Kaitlyn Dever) lives in her own world. Her home in rural Ohio is a dream cottage, filled with artsy trinkets and fairy lights. She goes to the city mainly to tend to her mother’s grave, which she does with love. She makes herself retro dresses and dances only to the tunes of a simpler time. She even has a miniature village, replacing the real city, where she is an outcast, looked at and spat at by passers-by.
One day, a circle of dry grass appears on Brynn’s lawn. She washes it off with a hose. But as night falls, a less controlled invasion occurs – terrifyingly inhuman visitors arriving in spaceships armed with telekinesis. Shunned by her neighbors, Brynn now faces an unprecedented threat of exile from her world. She accepts the challenge.
You’ll like it?
There is an underlying contradiction No one will save you it tells us something about the future of cinema – good and bad. On the one hand, the film looks and sounds like a mind-blowing theatrical experience. Aaron Morton’s widescreen cinematography makes the action amazingly clear, even in the night scenes. Sound engineers: Will Files and Chris TerhuneBatman) give aliens such an impressive vocabulary of clicks, rattles and buzzes that we don’t miss out on human dialogue.
It’s a testament to the visuals that the aliens never fail to be terrifying, even though their designs are familiar to the point of being retro. Older viewers may have to remember the mixture of sublime awe and bone-chilling fear they felt when they first saw Close Encounters of the Third Kind or Signs in the theatre.
Considering all this, isn’t it a crime that the film is not shown on the big screen? Not according to the director. In an interview with entertainment website Collider, Duffield described No one will save you as “filmed and created specifically for viewing at home. I think if it had been released in theaters it would probably have been a lesser film.”
He’s referring to the less traditional aspects of the film—the things he felt he could “get away with.” While, for example, in big-budget productions the plot points are spelled out, No one will save you it leaves a lot to your imagination – exciting or maddening, depending on your point of view.
The lack of dialogue frees the film from exposition, a tool Hollywood uses to ensure that no viewer feels left behind. Here, snippets of backstory come through visuals—letters, inscriptions on tombstones—but there are no government officials, scientists, or TV hosts to give us a general sense of the invasion. We experience everything through Brynn’s eyes.
And Brynn isn’t your average Jane protagonist, even if her immediate goal of staying alive is understandable. In most action films, she would be a comic relief character because it’s hard to imagine anyone less qualified to fight aliens. Not only is she a walking mood board, but her grasp of reality is sometimes unreliable for reasons the film teases and eventually reveals.
Dever specializes in characters who are damaged but fierce, homely but resourceful: the negligent teenager growing marijuana in Justified, the rape victim accused of lying in Unbelievable. She makes us care about Brynn without exaggerating the pathos inherent in the trauma plot – because yes, that’s exactly what it is. And we’re not just talking about the Hollywood cliché of giving an action hero a sad backstory to give him a storyline: Brynn’s damaged psyche is central to the film’s climax.
No one will save you indeed, it’s a strange hybrid that may not be able to thrive outside the brave new world of streaming. As the film gets trippier and more intense towards the end, some viewers – especially horror fans who come for the professional jump scares – lose faith. Some might even accuse the film of being a stealthy exercise in ship-of-the-millennium gazing.
To such an extent that No one will save you holds together because Brynn is such an intriguingly larger-than-life heroine, hiding out in her childhood home among the relics of her dead mom, like a candy-colored Norman Bates. Her outcast status turns out to be her strength. If she seems like a fit version of Ellen Ripley for the 21st century, perhaps it’s clear evidence that the pandemic has brought singles into the mainstream.
If you like it, try it…
Quiet place (2018; Paramount+, available to rent): No One Can Save You isn’t the first horror film to cut out much of its dialogue. In this post-apocalyptic film, alien invaders hunt by sound, so the only way to survive is to be as quiet as mice.
Celestial beings (1994; check your local library): A lot of things in No One Will Save You made more sense when I learned that one of Duffield’s inspirations was Peter Jackson’s dark drama, which launched the careers of Kate Winslet and Melanie Lynskey.
“Marianne” (2019; Netflix): This magical French series (sadly canceled after one season) is reminiscent of No One Will Save You in its masterful use of jump scares, but it deserves to be recommended to horror fans at every opportunity.