No One Will Save You

In a series of strange events, I ended up doing some work or a site that I was definitely the wrong kind of writer for but it did bring me to a place where I really am wanting to get back to writing the sorts of things I used to write for The Geek Girl Project. And this movie is a little brain worm that just won’t quite leave me alone.

No One Will Save You is a new release on Hulu and, in my opinion, worth a watch. From here on out, there will be spoilers. If you don’t want spoiled, come back after you’ve watched the movie – I’d love to know how you feel about it.

From here – Spoilers!

Aliens aren’t new subject matter by any stretch and it can be difficult to surprise an audience but this movie manages – at least in the initial viewing – to do so. My scary meter is well and truly broken. You can catch me with jump scares but it is very difficult to scare me with a horror movie. I found this movie more tense than scary but it definitely got me more than once with the jump scare.

The story follows a young woman who lives alone in her childhood home, who seems to be a social outcast. This leads to the movie’s odd eccentricity. There isn’t any dialogue. It isn’t a silent movie. There is music, there is noise, there are all the sounds of life, for someone who lives alone and has no one to say any words to. When the aliens show up, they have dialogue but the audience and the characters don’t comprehend the vocalizations in any real way beyond that the alien is making a trilling, whirring sort of noise.

Creature design is top notch but skews a bit to the illogical in some places. There are a lot of similarities in the main design to the design used by SyFy’s Resident Alien. The shifting in size was illogical for me but unnoticed during the watch, it wasn’t until after the movie was over that my logic switch got flipped and I’ll come back to this point.

It seemed like the point of the invasion was the proliferation of the species through a symbiotic type creature. Which begs the question if the aliens the viewers see are the species or if they are hosts as humanity is to become.

It was a nice fun watch. Once. It’s after it’s over and you’re out of that zone where disbelief is suspended and you can ignore all the missing things that the problems arise. And there were so many problems.

This young woman whose name they probably showed but doesn’t matter has built her life around her guilt for a thing that happened when she was a preteen where she killed her best friend. She lives in this place of arrested development with no one, not even a pet. The viewers are expected to believe somehow that she’s the only one who managed to fight back, to kill one before it could give her the symbiote creature. My subconscious must have noted a few other things as it spun in my brain for a few days before spitting it all out.

This girl who keeps accidentally killing people is allowed to remain human rather than be assimilated for a reason we are not clearly given and then catered to in a way that the real people would never have done. Her happy ending feels so hollow after a few days of reflection. She can only be happy, be part of the world again, when there aren’t any humans left. There are no animals in the whole movie, no military response to ships in the sky that by the end of the movie we know are visible. It doesn’t pass the sniff test in a lot of ways.

That doesn’t make it a bad movie – it was fun, creative, different, and the bit with the lack of dialogue was really interesting. The fact that the girl reacted appropriately when she was injured and didn’t just get up and keep running as so many injured final girls do was appreciated. The very logical response of the character to very illogical goings on felt real, in the moment.

While I don’t think I could watch it again because I don’t think my brain would let me past my problems with it now, it was definitely a fun first watch before said brain ruined it. No One Will Save You is a great watch. Once.

But that’s just this one girl’s opinion. I’m usually pretty forgiving for movies as far as logic and realism goes. I excel at suspending my disbelief but some movies only get that one watch before reason makes them just about unwatchable.