No One Will Save You Review: Create Highly Emotional Scenes Despite The Total Absence Of Dialogue
Cast: Kaitlyn Dever, Ginger Cressman, Zack Duhame, Dari Lynn Griffin, Geraldine Singer, Elizabeth Kaluev, Evangeline Rose, Lauren L. Murray
Directed By: Brian Duffield
Streaming Platform: Hulu and Disney+
Filmyhype.com Ratings: 3.5/5 (three and a half stars) [yasr_overall_rating size=”large”]
Arriving on Hulu and Disney+ on September 22, 2023, the film No One Will Save You by Brian Duffied, with the sole protagonist being a girl called to face not only an alien invasion but also her tormented past. Brynn Adams, played by Kaitlyn Dever, is a creative and talented young woman who, we don’t know why, has been removed from her community. With almost no dialogue, Kaitlyn Dever embodies a woman trying to live a normal life while her home is invaded by aliens. How will you save yourself? The director and screenwriter Brian Duffield gives life to an alien home invasion that draws heavily from films such as Signs and Close Encounters of the Third Kind (but ultimately also Home Alone) while introducing original elements, supported only by performance by Kaitlyn Dever. The actress plays the role of Brynn Adams, a young woman who leads a solitary life, on the margins of a community that she seems to deliberately want to avoid.
One night, however, someone violates her safe place: they are not thieves, but alien invaders from which the girl will have to defend herself by relying exclusively on her strength. As we will see in our review of No One Will Save You, the film – available for streaming on Hulu and Disney+ is an interesting product that manages to create highly emotional scenes despite the total absence of dialogue, highlighting Kaitlyn’s intense interpretation of Dever. The aliens do not provide anything new from a stylistic point of view – and at times they are even a little ridiculous – but they still fit perfectly into the context, that is, a home viewing in search of pure entertainment without commitment.
No One Will Save You Review: The Story Plot
Far from the world, Brynn lives alone in a small house, where she wakes up, eats, works, writes, and dances. All alone. She tries to get out of that boundary that has been built around her, but no one seems to want her. She greets and looks at others from afar, that world, and no one answers her when she shows up or worse still, they answer her with violent and denigrating gestures. The girl’s story, minute by minute, becomes clearer and it becomes clear how painful there is in her past life, memories, written words, people who have to do with her. Brynn is treated by the rest of the world as a social pariah, which results in her reclusive lifestyle., giving Brian Duffield the means to create a story that is not based on dialogue but on noises, verses, and faces contracted by fear and so, to make the story even more effective, the director must focus on something else to convey a sense of terror and desperation.
During the day Brynn lives in a (fake and constructed) idyll full of colors, from the cover, she finds comfort within the walls of the house where she grew up, when darkness falls something disturbing happens, and one night she is woken up by strange noises. Those nocturnal noises first make her believe that it is an animal, that she has forgotten to close the door, only in the end that someone has entered the house, perhaps a thief, an attacker. The reality, however, is different, it is something non-human. Nobody Will Save You goes from being a story that shows what happens if you wake up in the middle of the night and realize that the front door is open but then showing itself for what it is, a film that brings into play a much-abused theme in art, the scary, restless alien that invades the earth. Here they enter the house, the room, they inhabit the most intimate limits of people’s lives. It begins as a home invasion and then quickly evolves into pure crazy science fiction as the director himself says.
No One Will Save You Review and Analysis
After that night nothing is easier for Brynn, indeed the clashes, even hand-to-hand, with the extraterrestrials are increasingly intense and the girl not only has to stop the invaders but also has to deal with the past. Nobody Will Save You becomes a means of narrating Brynn, showing her wounds and her past, there is something that obsesses her, that torments her and never leaves her in peace it is a persecution for her that despite trying to smile falsely in the mirror he continues to think and rethink about a person, an event. Why was this girl removed? From whom? The reasons why she was ostracized are unknown, until the end, and yet, it is clear that Brynn fought to have a peaceful existence, she tried to do everything she could to go back to make amends and the night battle against the aliens reflects and underlines the struggles he had to face, combining drama and science fiction.
Duffield works on the metaphor throughout the film, aliens and aliens, yes because because of what she did, and what happened to her, the protagonist is alien to the community she was previously part of. The clash also becomes symbolic as Brynn does everything she can to avoid getting caught and puts herself at risk with every part of herself, with every cell of her body. She is afraid, she tries to bring out all the strength she has to save herself, she has to overcome tests and there will be many, and the viewer will discover her and her weak points better. The incipit makes us believe that everything is fine and puts the viewer in a position to have false beliefs just like Brynn but then it doesn’t take much, and everything is called into question, and he must recover the balance he has worked so hard to achieve.
Nobody Will Save You is a work that fascinates, that manages to intrigue, to lead into an alien and frightening world, to question everything because, as Brynn’s story teaches, from one moment to the next the false balance built with so much fatigue can suddenly collapse, plunging into hell between past and present. In a universe without too many words, the protagonist and the frightening and terrible aliens manage to have a dialogue made up of instincts and fears. Everything necessarily comes out from the depths, from silence and darkness. Now, you might think that this absence of dialogue is simply a ‘cool’ gimmick. But is not so. The fact that it has not been noticed for a long time and – above all – that it is not missed, shows that Brian Duffield knows well what he is doing with the material that he has in his hands and that he wrote.
He continually finds ways to maintain the status quo that doesn’t feel like cheap means. You won’t find yourself wondering why this chick doesn’t make a sound. It all makes sense, and you’re too worried about the inscrutable alien threat to notice anyway. A tension heightened by the suitably unnerving Joseph Trapanese soundtrack and the sound design that amplifies the noises. And as for the latter, Brian Duffield expands it to a crescendo until the situation spirals completely out of control. Of course, Brynn can’t ask for help because people won’t even speak to her (hence her title), so she has to fend for herself. As mentioned, Kaitlyn Dever delivers a luxury performance, managing to capture the protagonist’s sense of total isolation and fear, but also her determination and the sense of guilt she carries with her. The mystery surrounding Brynn unfolds in an orderly manner, without becoming overbearing. We learn just enough when we need to, and the more we understand affects our perception of everything Brynn has endured.
The one problem with No One Will Save You, however, is also quite significant, although it is beyond Brian Duffield’s control. It is clear that we are faced with work with a limited budget since some special effects used for the creatures are very weak and the insipid suburban setting does not help to improve things. Nobody Will Save You is only the second directorial work after Spontaneous (2020) for the 37-year-old from Pennsylvania, who has worked above all as a screenwriter in fun genre mash-ups such as the underrated Love and Monsters as well as The Babysitter and the Lovecraftian submarine thriller Underwater, with Kristen Stewart. What has distinguished him so far is an ever-so-slightly unconventional touch that recalls, to a lesser extent, that of his colleague Christopher Landon, and here too he proves to be an author to keep an eye on. And while it’s true that things get pretty crazy in the final act of No One Will Save You (something that might require more than one viewing to understand what happened), we find ourselves eager to see what Brian Duffield has come up with to close the film.
Kaitlyn Dever is a one women’s show, her character being completely alone on the scene most of the time; the inhabitants of the community are only marginal presences, while the alien invaders are shown to us mostly through shadows and silhouettes (except for a few scenes in which we realize that they embody the archetype, even a little ridiculous, of the extraterrestrial, with gray bodies oblong and large black eyes). The director keeps the camera focused on the girl who, having no dialogue available, entrusts her interpretation exclusively to the expressiveness of her eyes and gestures, accompanied by almost always muffled cries and screams. Thanks to Denver’s intense performance, this is enough to involve the viewer in Brynn’s emotional state, be it resignation, sadness, or pure terror. This rather original approach, if we want, will ensure that the film is remembered more as a test of style – acting and directorial – than for its screenplay.
If you were wondering where you’ve seen Kaitlyn Dever act before, you probably remember her from her roles in the TV series Man of the House (2011-2021), Justified (2011-2015), Unbelievable (2019) and Dopesick (2021) and for the films Beautiful Boy (2018) and The Losers’ Revenge (2019). The alien Invasion of the film is nothing more than a metaphor for the pain that accompanies the protagonist’s days. The fight against extraterrestrials reflects the personal battles undertaken by Brynn since childhood to be able to have an overall peaceful existence. In this reading, the aliens embody all those dramas that have punctuated her life, made up of losses, exclusion, and guilt: they are equally horrendous, seemingly insurmountable and to be faced completely alone.
Because, just as the title of the film says, no one will save her, and Brynn will have to find the strength to get out of this abyss alone. Nobody Will Save You, the film is an interesting product that manages to create highly emotional scenes despite the total absence of dialogue, highlighting Kaitlyn Dever’s intense interpretation. The aliens do not provide anything new from a stylistic point of view – and are even a bit ridiculous at times – but they still fit perfectly into the context, that is, a home viewing in search of pure entertainment without commitment.
No One Will Save You Review: The Last Words
Nobody Will Save You is a powerful horror film capable of frightening with elegant direction and thanks to a refined eye that amazes intelligent ideas. Everything rests on the protagonist capable of working on her body and emotions. In the second part, she gets lost a little, but she is always able to regain the viewer’s attention. If you are looking for a film that shocks, gives you shivers, and makes you jump out of your seat, that makes you feel like aliens and warriors ready to save yourself from aliens, this is the right horror. In short, No One Will Save You is a bit of A Quiet Place and a bit of War of the Worlds and should be at the top of your radar of titles to option for comfortable home viewing over the weekend.
