If you’ve seen even a few flying saucer movies from the Fifties, you know that the female character’s responsibility is to shriek and remain frozen in place when confronted by an alien.  No One Will Save You cleverly turns that notion on its head by making the damsel in distress resourceful and courageous in the presence of the alien invaders who come knocking.  Not a riot “girl-boss” way, but definitely far from helpless.  It’s an intriguing concept that’s well-executed, but by itself isn’t enough to build a feature-length feature film around.

The movie opens with a bit of deception on writer-director Brian Duffield’s part.  Freckle-faced heroine Brynn (Kaitlyn Dever) practices her ballroom dancing using shoe print floor stickers while Ruby Murry’s “Knock on Any Door” plays on a phonograph.  (The song is from 1957.)  The dress Brynn wears could easily have come from that era.  There’s a wall-mounted telephone and an enormous miniature reproduction of her town on the main floor.  She also sews and writes letters in long-hand.

Based on that evidence, I assumed that the story was set in the Fifties.  Nope.  Later scenes reveal a flat-screen TV in Brynn’s home  and someone using a laptop.  Why, then, is Brynn trapped in amber?  I think Duffield does this to call back to the science fiction movies of the Fifties.  It’s clever, I guess.

There’s something strange about Brynn besides her links to the past, however.  At one point she practices smiling and waving.  When she drives into town, she reenacts her performance for a male neighbor, who turns his back on her.  For some reason, everyone in the fictional town of Mill River hates Brynn.  The reason why is explained at the end of the movie, and while it makes sense, it feels out of place in comparison to the alien action that soon takes over the story.

A sign that something’s amiss in Brynn’s town is the appearance of crop circles.  Brynn promptly uses a garden hose and waters the area, but you and I know that those patterns only mean one thing: aliens have landed.

The meat of the story involves Brynn’s “close encounters” with the aliens, who explore at night.  The initial encounter is marked by creepy noises, electrical surges and the gurgling sounds of aliens conversing.  Brynn wakes up, looks around and finds an alien lurking in her house that looks exactly like you’ve seen in artists renderings:  a bulbous head, huge black eyes and a thin, unclothed body.  This one also has telekinetic powers, which it uses to open doors and whatnot.

While Brynn is understandably terrified, she never loses her head.  She tries to hide from the alien, but soon finds herself in the grips of the alien’s mental powers.  She accidentally kills it, but passes out.  The following morning, she covers the alien up with a blanket and drives to town to alert the police.

Unfortunately she runs into the parents of her best friend Maude, who she wrote apologetic letters to earlier.  Without saying a word, Maude’s mom spits in her face and storms off.  One quirk about this movie is that it’s nearly dialog-free.  It’s a concept that works when Brynn is alone, but feels strained in scenes like this one.

This confrontation leads to Brynn crying over her lot in life, then getting aboard a bus headed out of town.  I assumed she did this because she wants to start fresh, but it’s a strange turn of events.  The bus ride produces another fraught alien encounter, this time with passengers possessed by aliens wriggling inside their throats.  Brynn narrowly escapes and runs back home, where she prepares for that night’s alien throw-down.  Brynn’s a tough cookie, fighting off vicious aliens large and small.  

To the movie’s credit, all of Brynn’s narrow escapes are credible.  Nothing she does is superhuman; he just keeps fighting.  Eventually, when Brynn is captured, we see that her experiences are part of a full-blown alien invasion.  Fortunately for her, these aliens are also  telepathic, and the tragic nature of Brynn and Maude’s friendship gives them pause.  But will it be enough to prevent the alien takeover of Earth?

Recommendation

Sometimes, it’s easy to detect when a movie has been stitched together from different ideas.  That’s the case with No One Will Save You, where the majority of the plot involves alien invasion cat and mouse hijinks, which amounts to roughly sixty minutes of screen time.  From a practical standpoint, that part of the story wasn’t long enough to justify a feature film.  (The movie is a very lean eighty-five minutes.)  The simple answer was to bookend–or pad–the plot with some character-driven material.

The padding–which delves into the heroine’s “trapped in amber” quirkiness and a traumatic episode from her past–is so tonally dissimilar from the rest of the movie that it feels out of place.  Which is a shame because I was entertained by the middle of the movie, where the intrepid young girl narrowly avoids being captured by blobby-headed aliens.  That material would have been more than enough for an hour-long episode of an anthology television series, if they were still being made.

Speaking of which, if you’ve a fan of Rod Serling’s Twilight Zone, the premise of this movie should remind you of the episode titled “The Invaders”, where the inimitable Agnes Moorehead also fought off aliens.  (It clocked in at a tense twenty-five minutes.)  Writer-director Brian Duffield isn’t the first to steal from Serling’s classic series, and approaching that concept from a different angle is a good idea.  Instead of an old lady fighting off tiny invaders, there’s a spunky young girl going toe-to-toe with ones straight out of a “UFO encounters” show.

Duffield then insists upon having almost no dialog, which doesn’t pay off in a meaningful way other than being a challenge for actress Kaitlyn Dever.  There are several scenes where I anticipated a character (or characters) to say something important, and instead they just grunt.  I wish Duffield had gone with what I suspect he wanted to do, which was to make an actual silent movie, but nobody would have funded that project.  As a result, we get a movie that feels like a silent movie, but really isn’t.

Since the movie is focused exclusively on the heroine’s plight, the actress who plays her carries the movie.  Fortunately, Duffield has Kaitlyn Dever in that role, and she sells her character’s experiences extremely well.  The movie offers her a unique acting challenge, and I think that’s why she took the part.  Besides saying around five words, the rest of her performance requires her to act through facial expressions, screams and non-verbal emoting.  Dever gives such a convincing performance that it helped me to look past the fact that she’s acting opposite CGI aliens on loan from the SyFy channel.

This is the second film I’ve seen written by Duffield, the first being the Kirsten Stewart underwater monster movie Underwater.  Similar to that one, No One Will Save You also doesn’t have a first act but has an exciting middle section.  I like how Duffield approaches genres with a fresh perspective, and he makes the very familiar “hide and seek” plot device in this movie fresh.  His specialty appears to be depicting heroines in non-traditional ways.  Duffield is also capable at staging action sequences, and this movie reminded me of the Velociraptor scenes at the end of Jurassic Park.  (Other influences include Signs and Annihilation.)  Too bad everything is CGI now, because using practical effects for the aliens would have benefited his movie significantly.

No One Will Save You is a fun riff on the flying saucer invasion movies of the Fifties.  Kaitlyn Dever shows again why she’s one of the best actresses of her generation, this time in a role where she only has two lines of dialog.  Her wide-eyed performance and the movie’s tense alien encounter scenes make for a diverting watch.  Mildly recommended.

Analysis

Interestingly, No One Will Save You has the same problem as another recent movie inspired by Close Encounters of the Third Kind, The Vast of Night (2019).  In both cases, there’s enough story for one act, but not enough for a feature film.  I’m amazed that either film got made, given how apparent their overall slightness is.  I suppose having reasonable VFX budgets and a cast of unknowns made the productions viable from a cost perspective.  But the fact that someone greenlit both films on the basis of how the movies turned out is astonishing.

As I mentioned above, writer-director Brian Duffield pads his story by adding a very short opening act that introduces Brynn, then wrapping things up with the revelation that Brynn killed Maude during a heated argument, only to conclude with a wacky scene with Brynn dancing with alien-possessed townspeople.  I have no knowledge of how Duffield wrote his screenplay, but based on how uneven the movie is, I suspect he glued two ideas together out of necessity.

Vast also has one really good act, which comprises the second half of the movie.  In that act, senior citizens Mabel (Gail Cronauer) and Billy (Bruce Davis) discuss the alien encounter that happened decades before that left them traumatized.  Both the acting and the dialog are heartfelt and moving, and contrasts sharply with the first act.

I still don’t know what writer-director Andrew Patterson’s point was in spending so much time with disc jockey Everett and the younger girl who’s attracted to him, Fay (Sierra McCormick).  The act is mainly a stylistic exercise, with Patterson doing some interesting things with the camera while dutifully capturing all of the details of the period recreation.  The movie looks good for its $700k budget, but that doesn’t hide its narrative flaws.

The problem behind No One Will Save You and The Vast of Night isn’t with their directors.  Brian Duffield and Andrew Patterson are both skilled filmmakers, but there isn’t an avenue for their short story ideas outside of feature films.  The reboot of The Outer Limits ran from 1995 to 2002.  The Jordan Peele produced Twilight Zone reboot lasted two seasons, from 2019-2020.  Duffield and Patterson had good ideas, but only enough for an hour-long episode of television.

On Kaitlyn Dever

One of the benefits of getting older, if I can call it that, is following the careers of young actors over time.  I first noticed Kaitlyn Dever in the limited series Unbelievable (Netflix, 2019), which was based on a true story of the victims of a rapist who sexually assaulted multiple women over several years.  Her character Marie, who was troubled beforehand, spirals when she tells the police what happened to her, only for them to come back and say she made it up.

She plays another troubled young woman in Monsterland (Hulu, 2020), then again in Dopesick (2021, Hulu) and The Last Of Us (2025).  Interestingly enough, I never watched any episodes of the Tim Allen comedy Last Man Standing, which is her longest running television role to date.  I can say that I did see Ticket to Paradise (2022) which is her highest grossing film.

Like Brynn in No One Will Save You, Dever’s roles are very similar.  Her characters look pure  and wholesome, at least at first.  Even her performances involving characters who are sexually active come off as virginal.  She reminds me of Doris Day or Julie Andrews, in that she’s known  for her clean appearance, pretty but not sexy.  (I don’t think Dever wore any makeup in the roles I’ve seen.)

While there are differences in the roles I mentioned above, a recurring theme among them is how Dever’s characters start out clean (or somewhere in the neighborhood) and are sullied over the course of the story.  At the beginning of No One Will Save You, Brynn looks like she just stepped out of a rom-com from the Fifties.  In the end, she’s bloodied and covered in mud.  

Brynn’s transformation is similar to Dever’s character Betsy in Dopesick, who begins as an innocent young coal miner and becomes an Oxycodone addict and casualty.  Dever’s Marie Adler in Unbelievable starts out as a former foster child in a program for troubled teens, only to see her reputation ruined by overzealous police detectives who charge her with filing a false police report.  In Monsterland, Dever’s desperate single mom has an (close) encounter with a skin-stealing monster and abandons her child in a stranger’s car afterwards.  Dever’s Abby in The Last Of Us turns into a cold-blodded killer after Pedro Pascal’s Joel murders her father.

What’s interesting to me is how Dever, who’s twenty-nine at the time of this writing, has been typecast as a young woman who is ruined by forces beyond her control.  Whether it’s due to monsters, prescription pain killers, zombies or aliens, Dever’s pure characters eventually are roughed up by fate.  I think she’s been typecast in these roles because of her girl next door appearance.  The audience instinctively cares about anyone who is cute and innocent, and becomes concerned when that innocence is violated.  

Dever epitomizes every parent’s worst nightmare, the bright, beautiful and hopeful child who leaves home and is summarily destroyed by the world she encounters.  I would imagine that she’ll eventually grow out of these kinds of roles, but not anytime soon.  Like Michael J Fox, she’ll probably pass for a teenager well into her thirties.  She was twenty-six when No One Will Save You was released, and I would have thought she was eighteen.  Fox was still playing high-schooler Marty McFly when he was twenty-eight.

Dance steps

It’s too bad Duffield didn’t make No One Will Save You as a silent movie.  That would have been a better way to make the movie unique than the no dialog approach.

I can’t recall another movie that intentionally doesn’t provide any answers for why anything happens.  For example:

• Why are the townspeople still shunning Brynn ten years after Maude’s death?  (The movie was filmed in 2022.)
• Why does Brynn practice ballroom dancing if she has no partner?
• How is Brynn able to pay for her home?  Even if her mother fully paid it off before she died, that would leave Brynn with property taxes, utilities and food.  The movie implies that she sells crafts, but she would have to sell a lot of them to support herself.
• What happened between Brynn and Maude that led Brynn to hit her with a rock?
• Why would anyone call up and harass Brynn ten years after the incident in question?
• Why are the aliens invading Earth and possessing people?