Nobody sets out to make a cult classic on purpose, but if they did, they could do worse than asking Brian Duffield for a few pointers. The writer, director, and producer has made a habit of subverting expectations and playing a part in fantastic genre films that paint a familiar setup in a fresh coat of paint, and No One Will Save You might just be his best yet.
Having previously been involved in delicious horror comedy The Babysitter, surprise Lovecraftian terror Underwater, explosive literary adaptation Spontaneous, meme-happy viral sensation Cocaine Bear, and the egregiously overlooked Love and Monsters in various capacities, the filmmaker knows his way around deconstructing the established order and transforming it into something new. Taking that approach and running with it, Hulu’s sci-fi story with several ingeniously inventive twists and no shortage of unbridled ambition is guaranteed to become an enduring favorite.
It helps immeasurably that he cast the limitless talent that is Kaitlyn Dever in the lead role, with the Golden Globe and Primetime Emmy-nominated rising star delivering another knockout performance in a career that’s rapidly filling up with them. Shouldering the burden of carrying virtually the entire film from start to finish, her isolated homebody Brynn is as fascinating as she is complex, with minimal exposition allowing her arc to unfold in a three-dimensional fashion that gets you fully invested in her journey, ensuring that it isn’t just a nonstop barrage of relentless action sequences with no thematic meat joining the bones together.
There’s no shortage of that, to be fair, with Duffield deciding that eight minutes is ample enough time to establish the what, when, and where, before the who and why arrives and all hell breaks loose. Enjoying her alone time, which seems to be about the only kind she gets, Brynn suddenly finds herself plunged into a home invasion thriller, which then evolves into a high-octane chase movie, which is all garnished in nail-biting tension and jarring bursts of violence, as well as several standout action beats. It’s a tricky tonal balancing act to pull off, but it’s one that Duffield and Dever masterfully navigate through every minute of the lean, mean, running time that doesn’t possess so much as an ounce of fat.
It might be roller-coaster ride that marks the triumphant return of prominence to the spacemen more widely-famed for their emoji than their cinematic exploits these days, but it’s a testament to both Dever’s knockout turn and Duffield’s writing – both economical and layered at the same time – that No One Will Save You‘s title holds a double meaning, with an introspective story about doubt, grief, and self-forgiveness intertwined with a no-holds-barred sci-fi spectacular that makes incredible use of a limited budget reported to be around the $22 million mark, with the end result coming off as something vastly more expensive.
The genre has no shortage of content loaded to the brim with people staring ominously at things looming overhead, light beams sucking innocent victims to their mysterious fates, and bubble-headed extraterrestrials seeking to overthrow humanity, but Duffield knows that, and he expects you to know that, too. By taking pop culture’s familiarity with the various tropes and trappings of sci-fi and then deploying them in the order you’d expect, it might sound as if No One Will Save You is predictable given that it hits the beats you think it will in roughly the way you imagine it would.
Except, that couldn’t be further from the truth, creating an oxymoronically recognizable setup that becomes more and more unpredictable with each passing scene. There’s always a desire to showcase the stakes on a global level in films like this, with news footage or radio messages the preferred methodology of relaying to the viewer that the sh*t has hit the fan everywhere. Not in this case, however, with the entire tale restricted solely to not even Brynn’s hometown, but the radius of it in which she exists.
It would be easy to deliberately give the people what they want only to take it away and try something completely different, which makes it all the more impressive that Duffield has instead toed the line established by the last century of alien invasion stories, but somehow managed to create something undeniably distinctive to his style and sensibilities at the same time. Sure, No One Will Save You is about UFOs descending upon rural America and immediately setting about making a mark, but you’ve never seen it done quite like this before.
It’s remarkably simple in practice; a single-character narrative that deals with intergalactic interlopers from a ground-level perspective, something that’s definitely been done countless times before. And yet, No One Will Save You stands out among a crowded field for both the swings that it does take and the way it simultaneously acts as a love letter to its many forebears, all while putting its own definitive stamp on the proceedings.
