No One Will Save You Movie Release date: Friday, Sept. 22
Cast: Kaitlyn Dever, Elizabeth Kaluev, Zack Duhame, Lauren Murray, Geraldine Singer, Dane Rhodes
Director-screenwriter: Brian Duffield
Rated PG-13, 1 hour 33 minutes
Home invasion movies are widely available. Additionally, there have been several films about alien invasions. So it stands to reason that an extraterrestrial home invasion movie would eventually be made. With his sci-fi suspenser, writer-director Brian Duffield has succeeded in doing just that. It stars Kaitlyn Dever (Booksmart, Dopesick) as a young woman battling a formidable array of extraterrestrials who are definitely not of the cute and cuddly E.T. variety.
No One Will Save You Movie would benefit significantly from an immersive theater experience because it heavily relies on its creative sound effects, striking images, and spine-tingling score by Joseph Trapanese.
The protagonist of the novel is Brynn (Dever), a lone resident in a sizable home in the kind of town Norman Rockwell would have depicted. After the passing of her mother and sister, whose graves she constantly visits, she now spends much of her time alone, making intricate miniature dwellings.
One night, Brynn wakes up after hearing weird noises coming from inside the house, disrupting her peaceful life. It also exhibits her remarkable intelligence by allowing her to hang up the rotary phone she was using. Brynn fights the intruder until she kills it by slashing it in the head. She does not treat the invasion lightly.
Unfortunately, there are more where that one came from because Brynn has found out that the locals appear to have been taken over in the style of Invasion of the Body Snatchers. She retreats to her house after futilely seeking safety in a church and a police station.
The ensuing violent confrontations are the stuff of nightmares, both literally and figuratively; one struggle with an extraterrestrial finally came to an end when she bit down forcefully on one of its appendages. She rapidly understands that this is not particularly hygienic.
Duffield, who established his reputation as a genre film expert with his directorial debut Spontaneous and his screenplays for movies like Love and Monsters, maintains a high level of tension throughout the proceedings while periodically adding colored filters to the images to give them an ethereal quality.
Through inventive flourishes like Brynn revisiting her childhood experiences, much as in an extraterrestrial Our Town, the writer-director deftly avoids making the action too one-note. With an emotional underpinning that involves the main heroine battling her feelings of abandonment and loneliness, No One Will Save You transcends its narrative restrictions.
Dever manages the intense mental and physical demands of her job in a powerful manner while scarcely having any lines. Her wide-open eyes from fear make you wish there was an ophthalmologist on call during the shooting.
