Stream It Or Skip It: ‘No One Will Save You’ on Hulu, a Wild Thrill Ride in Which Aliens Invade Poor Kaitlyn Dever’s Home

The sort-of running joke in No One Will Save You (now streaming on Hulu) is how Kaitlyn Dever speaks about six words total in a 93-minute movie. And dialogue seems wholly unnecessary in this movie, where she plays a shut-in who does her damnedest to stave off a nutty-ass alien invasion. That means emotion needs to be conveyed nonverbally and through sheer physical action, which may have posed a challenge to Dever, whose work in Justified and Booksmart helped establish her as one of her generation’s premier talents. The film is by writer/director Brian Duffield, whose 2020 dark comedy Spontaneous was an under-the-radar delight, and was as funny as No One Will Save You is terrifying. 

NO ONE WILL SAVE YOU: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

The Gist: Right, I said “terrifying.” It begins with an establishing shot backed by one of those droning WHUMMMMMMMs on the soundtrack that tells us in no words, THIS IS ABOUT TO GET SCARY. But first, there’s this impossibly cute house that sits a bit off the beaten track down a wooded lane; the closest neighbor is a bit of a walk. And in that house, which, besides the TV, looks like a time capsule ca. 1982 – check out that rotary phone on the wall! – lives Brynn (Dever), and no one else. It’s a place where people into crafts and sewing could hole up and forget about the outside world for eons, which might be exactly what Brynn is doing. Through peripheral details, we piece together that her mother died a few years ago. She has a big table with a scale model of her town on it, and is thrilled when the new schoolhouse arrives in the mail. She practices smiling and waving in the mirror, which is curious; I mean, she’s not the Queen of England or whatever. And she writes longhand letters to someone named Maude, and we look over the shoulder and see the following sentence: “I can’t believe it’s been 10 years.” 

One day, Brynn finishes sewing a garment and packages it up and heads out to mail it. She stops to water a weird brown ring on the lawn that looks like a giant set his coffee cup there, but we know there’s no such thing as giants. In town, she tries smiling and waving as she rehearsed, but she’s met with scowls. What the hell did this sweet young woman do to earn such scorn? There’s an unsettling vibe in the air – is she a secret lunatic or something? Jeez, I hope not. She listens to records on an old console stereo and practices dance steps, and she seems happy to be alone, but it also seems so sad, and also also, she seems riddled with anxiety. If I had to guess, she hasn’t spoken to another human being since her mother passed. 

That night, Brynn’s asleep in bed under a calico quilt – everything in this house is calico or gingham checks, he said, touting his fabric-store cred – when strangenesses occur. You know, weird sounds, lights flickering on and off, etc. A crash outside rouses her and she looks out the window and the garbage cans are all askew and we hear weird froglike grunting and clicky noises. Is it a bear? A troll? A babadook? A Yautja (which is what dweebuses call the Predators from Predator)? No! It’s – and here I pause to watch the No One Will Save You trailer so I’m not spoiling anything that the trailer doesn’t spoil already. OK, I’m back: It’s an alien! And here I’ll refrain from describing it because we get only a passing glimpse at it in the trailer, but it’s clearly telekinetic and seems interested in abducting the living crap out of her. Why? Have these aliens reached the limit of what rectal probing can teach them? No spoilers man, no spoilers!

What Movies Will It Remind You Of?: NOWSY brings to mind Signs or The Happening if Shyamalan hadn’t been jumping sharks with every release. Duffield also channels some Spielbergisms from Close Encounters of the Third Kind, War of the Worlds and E.T.

Performance Worth Watching: Dever delivers a real, significant, empathetic character, and her work – guided by Duffield’s adroit direction – is frankly more revelatory than if she had actually, you know, said something.

Memorable Dialogue: There’s hardly any, so I’ll reveal the line in one of Brynn’s letters that tells us she’s probably working some shit out by writing them: “I don’t think I’ll ever forgive myself.”

Sex and Skin: Nah.

Our Take: You ache for Brynn, even though this depiction of her life is somewhat rote and predictable – the small-town everyone-know-everyone-else setting, where she’s deemed a pariah despite her seeming like a perfectly lovely person, for reasons that surely, inevitably, will be revealed in a flashback. Although Dever shows nothing but conviction for the character’s emotional journey, on paper, her arc is a bit Psych 101-simplistic. It’s functional, but never achieves more than that. 

Duffield’s focus on the physical components and economy of suspense-building are what makes NOWSY so taut and effective. He upends the home-invasion genre by making the assailants unearthly and therefore extra-unpredictable, and sows fear by upending the sense of security Brynn has fostered over many years in her incredibly homey home-sweet-home. She spends her days there, pretty much content to be alone. And all of a sudden, she’s not alone, and the sanctity of her safe space is violated by whatevers bent on doing whatever to her. All that uncertainty and imminent danger is terrifying to her – and to those of us who subscribe wholesale to the illusion of safety we create in our own homes, by nesting it with all of our stuff. Is it scarier than if malevolent humans kick down the door, a la the relentlessly miserable Funny Games? I don’t know – it all sucks. Anyone want to split that hair? Or are we content to move on?

Let’s move on. Duffield structures the film as a series of reveals: The first act establishes the What, the second establishes the How Much and the third establishes the What Now. The first two work better than the third, which ventures into maudlin sentiment and psycho-headf–ery. But Dever’s commitment functions as the glue that keeps it together, and keeps us in our seats. The film works on both gut and intellectual levels, delivering some big laughs and significantly jumpy scares, gruelingly intense and dynamically directed pedal-to-the-floor action and a resolution that’ll have you running the gamut from head-scratching to a raised eyebrow to bemused satisfaction. This is all a long way of saying No One Will Save You is a hell of a lot of fun.

Our Call: STREAM IT. Duffield is great at showing, not telling. Horror and sci-fi fans should watch this right NOWSY.

John Serba is a freelance writer and film critic based in Grand Rapids, Michigan.