A young woman fights back against an alien invasion in a film that works best when keeping it simple but crashes with a baffling third act
It’s rural America v malevolent alien invaders once again in a film that could be crudely renamed A Quieter Place, an almost wordless thriller that makes John Krasinski’s monster hit seem like an Aaron Sorkin joint in comparison. In No One Will Save You, the lack of dialogue isn’t as embedded within the story – these aliens are not triggered by sound – which often leaves the decision bordering on gimmicky but in its finest stretches, it works best as a challenge, for the writer-director Brian Duffield and especially for its lead Kaitlyn Dever.
The Booksmart star, who also made an indelible impression as a sexual assault survivor in Netflix’s Unbelievable, plays a young woman whose solitary life in a country home is rudely interrupted when she has an uninvited late-night visitor. Assuming, as one would, the invader to be of human origin, she’s wordlessly shocked to discover that it is in fact an alien, big eyes and even bigger head, as if it came not from space but from a 1950s film. She fights back, surprising even herself, and manages to kill it, but soon finds out that this was not an isolated incident and those in her town were not quite as lucky.