I was struggling to find quotes for this review and, while searching my usual sources, I chuckled to myself, “This movie is so dumb people aren’t even bothering to quote it online,” before I remembered that Brian Duffield’s whole schtick with his most recent scifi/ thriller is a lack of dialogue. Well, joke’s on me twice now I guess, because the first time was when I sat through the longest 93-minutes of 2023 while watching No One Will Save You.

Having recently lost her mother, being a lifelong pariah due to a childhood incident, and living on the outskirts of town, Brynn doesn’t have the easiest go of things. She spends her time writing notes to a friend, decorating her space, and spending quality time alone. But, when something from outside suddenly finds its way in, her whole world is turned upside down.

No One Will Save You is a movie best suited for two types of moviegoers I think: People who like “home invasion” thrillers, and/ or people who like Shyamalan/ Peele films [a director comparison that is sure to draw some ire]. This is to say that No One Will Save You is going to appeal to most people that think they’re interested in the cover-art for the film, but really annoyed me start to finish.

While I’d describe some movies as “insistent” — music that demands you feel a certain way, dialogue that tells you what to think, cinematography that focuses on obvious and sloppy set pieces to force an emotion — I would call this one “complacent”. No One Will Save You is a movie that constantly makes up the rules as it goes with no interest in justifying or developing them further. Are the aliens intelligent? Yep!.. Except for when they’re stalking a shrieking, stomping girl around her house. Do they have telekinetic abilities that let them control nuanced things like opening a fridge door but also the strength to throw a person through a wall? Also yes, but they’ll only do it when it’s convenient. Are the monsters powerful enough to put deep scratches in hard flooring or tear through solid wood doors with ease? Oh yeah, but that strength won’t translate into injuring our protagonist, don’t worry. The film just decides whatever it needs in any given moment and allows it to happen without ever explaining or justifying itself; something that I find that absolutely infuriating. This kind of arbitrary rule breaking/ making is one of my cinema sins and it’s on full display here. Let’s talk about the narrative though.

I like films that tell obtuse narratives which run parallel to the more instantly digestible ones they show onscreen. In that regard, what No One sets out to do is both commendable and very interesting. This isn’t really a movie about aliens in the extraterrestrial sense at all, and I love that. Brynn’s symptoms of anxiety are well performed and executed, the thematic ties to being “trapped” and “alienated” are very clear and intelligently implemented, and the whole theme of killing the outsider to find yourself within is clever. However, the film bobbles this in two major ways that turn the journey from something deeply meaningful like A Ghost Story or Nine Days into something that’s largely grating and almost entirely boring. The first, weirdly, is something that I often criticize films for not doing, and that’s committing to the bit. The second is the film’s atrocious pacing/ content offload.

The whole kitsch of this film is that there’s no dialogue. The aliens “speak” in these genuinely excellent hoots and guttural rumbles, while our protagonist has maybe four lines in the entire film. This is a really interesting concept to play with in terms of the “alien” theme — making our lead avoid doing things we’d consider “natural” cleverly forces us to feel a certain way about her, or avoiding speaking is a metaphorical way to show she can’t find her voice to escape her internal world — but, in practice, it just means that almost the entire runtime of the movie is Brynn shrieking, panting, or grunting. If someone didn’t know any better, I may as well have been watching a spooky-season themed porn… For the plot of course. These are all normal parts of this kind of film but, without the soundbed of human voices and engaging dialogue, it just becomes a very annoying movie to listen to — I don’t know if I’ve been more irritated by a film’s audio since Tenet. Clever idea, bad execution [which is probably how I’d sum up the whole film and most of Duffield’s career in general].

As for pacing, the film starts with an absolute bang and then instantly subverts what you expect from this kind of excursion. Which I totally loved. From there, however, No One sticks on this singular note with little-to-no meaningful development for the next hour-or-so of its runtime. Once the creatures are introduced we don’t get anymore meaningful story development until probably 15-minutes before the end of the film. Yes, we see bits of the invasion and get some arbitrary variations on the creatures themselves, but none of it really matters or drives the overall narrative forward. This is all too bad because, the moments where the narrative is prodded forward are actually quite good and very well realized. The movie is extremely empty and that made it very difficult to engage with. You could watch through Brynn’s first encounter with the creatures, skip the entire middle, then just watch the last part of the film; you’ll be no worse off and will have saved yourself very near an hour of time.

I want to watch something that Duffield directs, but doesn’t write. Of the five films of his that I’ve seen, I’ve loved one [Spontaneous, his only other directing credit], thought one was very simple but well executed [Underwater], one was great for what it was but otherwise pretty standard [The Babysitter], and then thought the other two were fine-to-bad [No One Wil Save You, Love and Monsters]; I didn’t realize I’d seen so much of his work accidentally and he has a ton of really good ideas and realizes most of them in a style that I’d love to see more of within this space. I just don’t think that his storytelling is [generally] up to par. Though the visual effects themselves look really really bad at certain times, the concepts they’re designed to portray are largely very cool and creative, which is clearly his style and vision showing through. We’ve all seen alien abduction at this point, but Duffield still manages to make it look and sound very cool here. I want more of that in something much better written.

Overall, No One Will Save You is a film that wants to say a lot, but gets in its own way with irritatingly empty pacing, an over commitment to an unfulfilling trick, and being simultaneously too obtuse to pick up easily and too transparent to demand audience engagement. I think this is one that could have used a little more time in the oven and reminds me more of 2018’s Bird Box than anything it actually wants to be compared against. For a better alien-based scifi, check out 2019’s The Vast of Night and, for a better home-invasion, I’d turn to 2021’s Motherly. If you want something really obtuse but just as smart, 2013’s Under the Skin is a great choice. Regardless, I wish someone had saved me from No One Will Save You.

“I’m sorry.”