No One Will Save You movie review: Kaitlyn Dever delivers (yet another) star-making turn in Hulu’s dialogue-free thriller

The film’s opening moments take us through a regular day in her life, gracefully alluding to some sort of past trauma. Brynn lives by herself in the large house, isolated from the rest of the community; she writes letters to a friend named Maude, and in her spare time, builds an intricate model of a small town. Something is up with Brynn, but we don’t know what. That night, she’s awakened by a loud noise. Brynn tiptoes out of her bedroom to investigate, and is shocked to discover what looks like an alien creature from a ‘50s movie wandering around her house. The creature seems to be lost, and in an unexpected turn of events that may or not play like a tribute to ET the Extra-Terrestrial, it walks over to Brynn’s landline telephone — she seems to have designed her existence around a bygone era — and attempts to make a call. But soon enough, a terrified Brynn goes on the offensive, and winds up in a position that forces her to go to the cops the next day.

There’s no reason to reveal what happens next; the movie has been engineered to keep you on your toes as Brynn finds herself in a Home Alone-type situation where the invaders aren’t a couple of New York City goons, but an alien that looks like it served as a blueprint for those Mexican fossils that were recently made public. No One Will Save You stops being a home invasion thriller after that tense first act, and transforms into more of a chase movie for the next 30 minutes, before ending in the most abstract manner that you could’ve imagined.

It’s likely that most audiences will check out in the film’s final 15 minutes, when the source of Brynn’s pain and loneliness are finally revealed. But this is an ambitious movie, both technically and thematically. You want to know how Duffield will flesh out his high-concept no-dialogue idea almost as much as you want to know if Brynn will survive. It’s a pure sound and light show that goes back to the basics, deploying editing, framing, lighting, and performance, all in service of story.

But after the initial novelty has worn off — No One Will Save You doesn’t have the inbuilt drama of, say, A Quiet Place, or even last year’s Malayalam film Malayankunju — the experience can get a bit choppy. Some set pieces are staged wonderfully, though, and Dever is more than capable of carrying something like this on her shoulders. She was so captivating in both the coming-of-age comedy film Booksmart and the harrowing Netflix mini-series Unbelievable. But there’s a certain repetitiveness that begins to sink into the proceedings during the second act, when Duffield takes the action outside Brynn’s house, and makes the curious decision to let the air out of film’s claustrophobic tone. Nothing, however, can prepare you for the wild swings that he takes towards the end.

He’s a phenomenal filmmaker, whose debut feature — the coming-of-age dark comedy Spontaneous — was one of the best movies of 2020. It remains criminally underseen, and there’s a fear that No One Will Save You’s direct-to-streaming release might impact its discoverability as well. The movie is a great advertisement for Duffield’s palpable affection for old-school B-movies; he also co-written the very enjoyable teen slasher The Babysitter and the sci-fi creature-feature Underwater. We might be witnessing the earliest signs of the arrival of a prominent new voice in American genre cinema, a true successor to M Night Shyamalan.

No One Will Save You
Director – Brian Duffield
Cast – Kaitlyn Dever
Rating – 4/5