Director/Screenplay – Brian Duffield, Producers – Brian Duffield, Allen Mandelbaum, Tim White & Trevor White, Photography – Aaron Morton, Music – Joseph Trapanese, Visual Effects Supervisor – Stephane Paris, Visual Effects – DNeg (Supervisor – Kunal Ghosh Dastider), Special Effects Supervisor – Matt Kutcher, Practical Alien Effects – Amalgamated Dynamics (Supervisors – Alec Gillis & Tom Woodruff, Jr.), Production Design – Ramsey Avery. Production Company – Star Thrower Entertainment.
Brynn Adams lives on her own in a farmhouse in the town of Mill River. She is woken to discover an alien in the house but manages to accidentally kill it. That night, her house comes under assault by further aliens where Brynn uses all in her capacity to fight them off.
No One Will Save You is an Alien Invasion film. During the early scenes with Kaitlyn Dever being spooked around the farmhouse by an alien, I felt like I was getting vibes of the scenes with Melinda Dillon and Cary Guffey alone in their home from Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977). It wasn’t until some way into the film that the penny dropped and I realised that what I was watching was a big-budget remake of The Twilight Zone episode The Invaders (1961).
Written by genre legend Richard Matheson, The Invaders was one of the best episodes of The Twilight Zone and featured Agnes Moorehead as an old woman in her farmhouse being attacked by miniature aliens before she fights back and defends herself with what she has to hand. The notable aspect of the episode was that there was only one actor (Moorhead) and no dialogue until a voiceover right at the end.
There are some significant differences between The Invaders and No One Will Save You. In the original, the aliens are miniature in size, whereas here they are standard Grey Aliens from UFO lore. The only noticeable thing that gets changed is that Kaitlyn Dever is aged 27 but looks about eighteen, while Agnes Moorehead played the part as an old woman – there seems like some forty years difference between the two characters. The criticism you could make is that the part here really feels like it is one written for a woman in her thirties/forties at least and Kaitlyn Dever feels just too young to convincingly fill it.
Kaitlyn Dever hides in the farmhouse from an alien
The film elaborates out on the basics of The Invaders with more elaborate special effects and ventures out beyond the farmhouse and into the town. There is the notable absence of the twist ending of The Invaders that revealed that the aliens were Earth astronauts and that Moorehead was a giant on an alien planet. Aside from that, the film keeps the essence of the episode – of the woman alone in the farmhouse, her fighting back against the aliens with improvised weaponry from her kitchen, and of course the lack of dialogue. In fact, there is only three lines, a total of five words spoken throughout the entire film. This does result in some peculiar contortions, like where Kaitlyn Dever’s interactions with the townspeople are communicated solely in meaningful glares.
Brian Duffield emerged as a screenwriter on films like Insurgent (2015), Jane Got a Gun (2015), The Babysitter (2017), Love and Monsters (2020) and Underwater (2020), as well as producing Cocaine Bear (2023) and as creator/producer of the animated Skull Island (2023- ). He previously made his directorial debut with Spontaneous (2020), a witty and appealing film about teenagers that unexpectedly explode. No One Will Save You was his second directorial outing.
Here Brian Duffield shows himself as a fine director. Much of the film consists of Kaitlyn Dever moving around the house as half-seen things scuttle through the shadows. Duffield builds a good deal of suspense and creepy intensity in this manner. The creature effects, both physical and digital, are quite good. All before the film reaches a decidedly ambiguous happy ending.
The only part that didn’t quite work was a scene where Kaitlyn Dever boards a bus to find it is filled with townspeople who have been taken over by parasites on the top of the head who come after her. It is a scene that feels as though it comes from a whole different Body Snatchers film, where the effect that No One Will Save You has lies more in its shadowy, half-glimpsed suspense.
