Brian Duffield has been an industry screenwriting phenom for years, though it took too many years for his ribald, clever, and high-concept stories to eventually find their way as finished films, or at least finished versions of his once ribald, clever, and high-concept stories. I fell in love with him as a storyteller with 2017’s The Babysitter, and that love matured into admiration and appreciation with 2020’s Spontaneous, his directorial debut, also my top movie of that year. As hyper verbal and bracing and layered as that stylish movie with major attitude was, and brilliantly so, his follow-up is a sprint in the other direction. No One Will Save You (I keep wanting to type You Will Not Survive This as its title) is a contained thriller with hardly a line of spoken dialogue as we follow Brynn (Kaitlin Dever) battle aliens. Being a nearly dialogue-free experience puts much on the immersive visual experience, and I don’t know if the movie fully sustains this, but the combined effort is solid and sneaky fun.

This is a throwback to the early 1990s invasion thriller, the heyday of The X-Files and Fire in the Sky when the little gray guys with the big black eyes became our default model for aliens. There’s an easy dread to compile when it comes to a powerful and otherworldly entity that has decided to target you, a lowly human. Duffield is able to engineer plenty of anxious moments and jump scares, allowing the scares to luxuriate by building suspense as well as the adrenaline bursts of sudden surprise (a moment with “toes” made me squirm). He makes a key creative decision early to showcase his aliens. Usually these kinds of movies are more guarded about their monsters, confining them to the shadows or at least relying upon the viewer’s imagination to fill in the blanks before pulling back and finally revealing their true form. There’s a reason that so many filmmakers follow this model, and it’s because the final reveal usually pales in comparison to whatever unseen horror the imagination can fathom. The slender creatures do make for creepy silhouettes, and there are three or four different versions of the aliens and this allows for some additional fun design discovery. A long-limbed one reminded me of a praying mantis. The chattering sound design and ominous lighting do a lot of atmospheric heavy lifting to elevate the mood. If you’re looking for a generally well-executed home invasion thriller with some gasp-inducing moments, No One Will Save You fulfills its promise. There’s a pleasing clarity to the plot mechanics, even if you are wondering why this woman doesn’t abandon her house.

There isn’t much that needs explaining, which streamlines its 90 minutes into a series of reactive responses to the home invasion, with some clues and inferences throughout for us to start to piece together why our heroine is so troubled and seems so isolated by her small-town community. It makes for a visceral, visual method of storytelling but it also limits how much information and depth we are going to encounter. Our main character is still suffused by her own guilt and lasting trauma from her past, and as the movies seem to magically allow, she’s going to be given an external struggle that might just allow her to finally exorcise and resolve a dicey internal struggle. The alien encounters don’t seem to give us better insight into who our protagonist used to be, who she is now, and the misplaced perception of the townspeople. She’s retreated inward. She’s resourceful. She uses what she has to better guard from further close encounters, but all she has are ordinary items found in an old farmhouse, not high-powered weapons and booby traps. She’s just one frightened young woman in an old house trying to do her best. By holding back, we’re only given so much with this character, so she can feel somewhat underwritten and kept archetypal, underpinned by her past mistakes and her current otherworldly dilemmas. I just don’t know if there’s enough going on with this character even with the repeated alien visitation.

Dever (Booksmart) is one of our best young actresses and an excellent choice to anchor our drama. Without the safety of words, much is required from her, and Dever provides a compelling presence even when I feel like the character is hitting her limits. Carrying an entire movie and doing so much with non-verbal acting techniques can be a weighty ask, but Dever relishes the challenge, and through her capable performance we are given a hero worth rooting for.

The movie does an acceptable job of keeping us, and her, relatively in the dark while still not making the sides too overwhelming. How can one Earth girl combat a species with such advanced technology, size, and power? Well, we don’t fully know what they want, and these little green men are still made of fleshy stuff and can still be hurt and killed like any other fleshy goo-filled life form. They may be advanced but they can still get killed, and that at least gives our heroine a chance that she shouldn’t have. The aliens’ plan is generally unknowable, and just trying to piece together a fuller picture of who they are, the different species and forms, and what their purpose might be for the town is plenty of work for the rest of us that don’t speak the space language. It’s enough of a reasonable learning curve to fill out a short movie while keeping focus on the task at hand, whether it’s hiding under the bed, running around the house, or simply trying to figure out whether going into town for help is worth the effort. I wish there was a little more deliberation on her part about whether the aliens might be preferable to her neighbors. The ending isn’t exactly ambiguous but reminds me a little of 2019’s Midsommar, where letting go of one’s personal hang ups might not be the catharsis of enlightenment it may appear to be.

No One Will Save You is a throwback sci-fi thriller that speaks to the human vulnerabilities we can all feel, being helpless against overwhelming powers, be they alien or our own guilt. It’s a fun thriller with some well-wrought sequences of suspense and jump scares. I don’t know if there’s more happening beyond the visceral appeal of the experience. The character and the situation don’t provide much in the way of larger depth and analysis, and more than a few will likely be able to guess her tragic back-story, though that’s also a credit to Duffield providing the key pieces. As a change of pace, No One Will Save You proves that Duffield is an entertaining and capable storyteller no matter what restrictions he holds himself to. I just prefer my Brain Duffield stories without any restrictions because we only have one Brian Duffield.

Nate’s Grade: B