No One Will Save You (2023) Never been a huge fan of films that hinge on a technical or stylistic gimmick.....
Even Hitchcock regretted "Rope", his bizarre thriller shot in sustained 10 minute chucks and cleverly edited to look as if the entire 90 minutes was filmed that way......
That category would normally also cover movies kept deliberately silent, devoid of spoken dialogue. But wait! you say.......wouldn't that force a director into creating a purely cinematic experience, to tell a story in visual imagery only?
True that.......and I'm happy to say, writer-director Brian Duffield not only pulls it off, but knocks this one out of the park.
No dialogue, but plenty of that pure cinema that Hitchcock always professed to hold dear (and didn't achieve as often as he liked.....)
I distinctly remember that Steven Spielberg contemplated an alien film like this before presenting us with the wise benevolent outer space visitors of "Close Encounters Of The First Kind" and "E.T.". He toyed with the concept of an all out alien home invasion inside a family's home......(kind of like "Poltergeist", except with little green men instead of pale, transparent spirits. )
Well, here we have Brynn, a painfully lonely, shy young woman (Kaitlyn Dever, giving an absolute bravura turn) living a solitary life in her late mother's big country house in the woods........
In precise telling scenes, we see she's a pariah in her small community, shunned, ignored and despised by the townsfolk.......especially the Chief Of Police and his wife. But why? That reveal comes much later and figures into the rather amazing finale......
Brynn's got even worse problems to contend with.......when one night, a spindly. almond-eyed alien breaks into her house. No fuzzy, wuzzy cutesy-wootsy E.T. this nasty creature does not hold Brynn's best interests at heart. Terrified to the max, Brynn's forced to play hide and seek with the beast, who's armed with 'Carrie's telekinetic powers and a hot temper besides.
And the thrill ride's only just getting started, as bigger and badder aliens lay siege to the house along with some hapless humans converted into zombie-fied minions by parasitic aliens shoved down their throats.
By nature of the storyline, Kaitlyn Dever's a one woman show here (an opportunity rarely awarded to young actresses) and wow, does she ever make the most of it. She definitely gave BQ a case of Dever Fever and we've no intention of missing anything she does from now on.
The very best part of his film is yet to come though.....in an ending I'd defy anyone to predict ahead of time.
Writer-director Duffield, wary of ending his film with the all too typical, but inevitable, grim finale of current horror films opts for an unusually startling wrap-up......downbeat, yet strangely upbeat, sad, but oddly satisfying.......a Rod Serling 'Twilight Zone' worthy zinger, somewhere between a warm hug and slap in the face.
With the Halloween movie season only days away, here's a nice little imaginative scare-fest to kick off the festivities.....BQ says save "No One Will Save You" for an upcoming chilly night. And all hail our newest fave, Kaitlyn Dever.....4 stars (****).
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