Nobody’s Gonna Save You is a science-fiction horror film written and directed by Brian Duffield (Spontaneously). It stars Emmy Award-nominated Kaitlyn Dever (Unbelievable, Wicked) as an isolated young woman named Brynn whose home is suddenly invaded by aliens. The film is notable for having only five words of dialogue throughout.
I think I may be in the minority here in that I didn’t really enjoy this movie. While I like Dever’s performance and some of the ideas presented, Nobody Can Save You is a fairly generic horror film with poor pacing and visuals.
The idea of making a film with little to no dialogue is a fairly new idea these days, and I think it’s interesting that Duffield tried to do something similar with this film. Such restrictions force filmmakers to get creative and find other ways to tell a story. Nobody Will Save You relies heavily on both visuals and music to tell its story, and it does a pretty decent job of doing so.
Another strong element of this film is Dever’s performance, which carries over almost the entire film. I loved her previous roles in Short Term 12 and Bookstore, but I was curious to see if she could pull off the role with little to no dialogue. Luckily, her facial expressions and body language do a lot to give Brynn a lot of emotional depth. It’s very clear throughout the film that she’s in a lot of pain, made worse by the fact that the entire town hates her… and also because of the aliens.
Unfortunately, I found this film rather boring. Obviously this won’t ring true for everyone since a lot of people seem to really like No One Can Save You, but I just couldn’t even pretend to care about anything that happened in the movie.
Part of this has to do with how typical the aliens in the film look. If you’ve ever seen anything with aliens, you probably already know what they look like: gray skin, oval-shaped head, beady black eyes. If the only word they knew was “moo”, then they would be almost the same as the aliens from South Park. Not only that, but their jerky movements and mechanical sounds give the impression that Duffield was simply sticking with the first alien idea that came to mind. It’s really disappointing to see such a boring portrayal of aliens, especially after seeing the interesting twist presented in last year’s No.
Unsurprisingly, the CGI was also lacking, which can probably be attributed to its $22 million budget and direct-to-streaming release. Granted, I’ve definitely seen worse effects in films with much higher budgets (The Flash, for example), but I think that’s mostly due to Duffield being too ambitious for the money he had. This movie probably would have been better if Duffield had written the script so that the aliens were mostly hidden.
Speaking of which, I think the script is one of the reasons why I didn’t like No One Will Save You. Duffield also wrote scripts for McG’s dark comedy slasher film The Nanny and William Eubank’s sci-fi horror film Underwater. I enjoyed both of these films to some extent, but mostly because of their directors rather than their scripts. It’s entirely possible that I would have enjoyed this film more if a different writer and/or director had been involved, as I don’t know if Duffield would have been the best person to handle such a film.
Overall, Nobody Can Save You was a disappointment. Kaitlyn Dever’s performance was as great as I could have expected, but she was probably the only element of the film that I really enjoyed. I was annoyed for almost the entire movie, and I’d say it’s far worse than just a bad movie.
RATING: 5/10