Starring Kaitlyn Dever

Directed by Brian Duffield

Disney +

A lonely young woman in rural America is besieged by aliens.

You know those all-you-can-eat Chinese buffets? I love Chinese food, so when I’m confronted with a stack of sesame prawn toast over here, and spring rolls over there, a bit of crispy duck on the side, ladles of beef with black bean, and sweet and sour pork, and chicken chow mein, and for some reason BBQ spare ribs, and egg fried rice, and, and, and… I can construct a plateful taller than the Burj Khalifa. We’ve all been there. It ought to be delicious but five minutes later we’re already feeling bloated and somehow it doesn’t taste of anything apart from MSG, and you realise it isn’t really a coherent meal at all.

An hour into No One Will Save You I was suffering from a distinct case of Alien Invasion buffet indigestion.

To be fair, it starts well. Brynn (gamely portrayed by the excellent Kaitlyn Dever) lives alone, having been ostracised by her town for reasons we will discover later in the story. One morning she discovers strange circles in the grass and later that night she is woken by the sound of an intruder downstairs. A brief investigation reveals said intruder to be an alien, which frankly she ought to have guessed with all the dodgy stuff going on with the electrics. Surely everyone knows that if your lights flash on and off and the telly comes on randomly there’s bound to be an extra-terrestrial somewhere in the neighbourhood.

Anyway, the next twenty minutes isn’t bad. The alien stays largely in the shadows and there are some decent jump scares. But then, sadly, the little grey man steps out of the darkness revealing himself to be no more than slightly iffy CG and the film degenerates into a large plate of randomly assembled all-you-can-eat alien clichés.

The aliens themselves seem to have been brought in from digital central casting, looking like your bog-standard Close Encounter Greys, which I thought we weren’t doing any more ever since Jordan Peele pointed out in the Twilight Zone episode A Traveller that Greys are essentially a form of South-East Asian racist iconography with roots in America’s wars with Japan, North Korea and Vietnam. Acoustically, their clicks and grunts have been lifted wholesale from the Predator movies. The use of mysterious lights moving outside the house, slatted blinds, and domestic appliances going amok is straight out of Spielberg, and there are dollops of Signs, A Quiet Place and Arrival for good measure.

I managed to forgive the derivative appearance of Brynn’s visitors for a while longer, as it seemed that they were, to a certain degree, a metaphor for the girl’s isolation and grief. But then, the movie seemed to insist that we take them seriously, at which point I ceased to.

It doesn’t help that the film can’t make up its mind exactly what powers these Greys are supposed to possess. The rules keep changing. Some of them are telekinetic. There’s a vicious little gremliny one. There’s a stupid one who gets locked in a car and for some reason isn’t blessed with the telekinesis that could easily set it free. There’s a spidery one that can scuttle like the ‘bugs’ from Starship Troopers, and a tall one who, bewilderingly, is into voguing like Madonna (I kid you not) – which is taking the whole retro thing too far. And then most bizarrely of all, there’s a whole bunch of them who seem to be into bereavement counselling.

The one vaguely original riff in No One Will Save You is that the story is told almost entirely without dialogue, and this holds the attention… until it becomes too much of a contrivance; one which writer/director Brian Duffield stubbornly refuses to let go of. After a few more minutes of girl-versus-alien hand-to-hand, I couldn’t help thinking that she definitely would have verbally told the invader to ‘do one’ by now.

Verdict: No One Will Save You might have been a tight little alien invasion gem, if only Duffield had set himself some clearly defined parameters as opposed to quoting from so many other movies it leaves the viewer queasy with the sense that most of this over-loaded extra-terrestrial buffet has been poorly reconstituted. 4/10

Martin Jameson

www.ninjamarmoset.com