At first glance No One Will Save You (2023) is a standard alien invasion movie, but beyond the obvious, surviving the takeover of the planet plot, the story is actually about dissociation caused by trauma.
Brynn (Kaitlyn Dever) lives an isolated life that has the feel of a fairytale. Alone in a massive house, she spends her time sewing dresses, then selling what she makes to customers by post. The point is, she’s alone, happy to sip wine under an umbrella by her pond, while penning letters to her friend Maude. On the surface it’s idyllic, as if she’s a character in a Disney film, minus the animated birds flitting about helping.
But it quickly becomes apparent Brynn’s life is a little more complicated, there’s something darker in her isolation. When delivering packages to the mailbox in town, she does her best to avoid the locals, and it would seem they do their best to avoid her. My initial impression was, she’s a ghost, people can’t see her, or when they do she’s a strange apparition, hence the puzzled angry looks. It might also explain why she doesn’t get to speak.
There can’t be more than three lines of dialogue in the whole film. There are grunts and sighs of exertion but nothing you’d consider an exchange of words. The real reason for Brynn’s selective mutism is revealed in the third act but this lack of talking is intriguing. It starts out as a byproduct of Brynn’s isolation, then morphs into a filmic gimmick, she has no voice, finally landing as a mirror of the alien’s sonic clicks and pops.
The second act is a game of escape and evade between Brynn and an assortment of aliens that chase her, determined to feed her some kind of mind controlling parasite. Although the aliens come in a variety of sizes, they all share the familiar asexual grey, long limbed, bulbous black eyes, seen in so many abduction films. There’s a certain nostalgia in the way they look, an aesthetic that grips the rest of the film. This nostalgia is how Brynn dissociates from her actions in the past, it’s a place where there’s forgiveness for the unforgivable. Another reason perhaps for the feeling we have by the end, we’re in Brynn’s subconscious, in some kind of pacifying construct.
Nostalgia is a lie, a false remembering of the past, but used as a language the way writer director Brian Duffield does here, it creates something of an enigma, and allows Brynn to resolve her trauma, her need to be forgiven, with the suitably sentimental end.
