The big picture
- No One Will Save You is a thrilling sci-fi horror film that revolves around Brynn’s battle against aliens attempting to take over the world.
- It is implied throughout the film that Brynn is harboring a secret that is fully revealed at the end: she killed another girl when she was younger.
- Despite the seemingly happy ending, with Brynn joining the alien society and finding community, it is a constructed reality based on the destruction of humanity.
Editor’s Note: The following contains spoilers for No One Will Save You. An often exciting science fiction horror work. Nobody will save you is a film that lives and dies by the performance of a spectacle Kaitlyn Dever as the lonely Brynn, who ends up having to take on a group of aliens trying to conquer both the world and her home. The film has almost no dialogue and fights throughout the small community against a variety of different creatures who are hell-bent on taking them down. It seems like she’s been carrying a secret all along that explains why she’s alone. This is hinted at several times, but is only fully revealed at the end where all of this is laid out. In case it wasn’t already clear, This piece will spoil everything in the film until the final moments. In case you haven’t seen it yet, it’s best to bookmark this page and come back after you see it for yourself. With that all out of the way, let’s dive in.
After being put to the test throughout the film, Brynn appears to have been defeated by the aliens and taken into their spaceship. There they look into her mind and see what she has carried with her all her life. We see that when she was younger she got into a fight in the woods outside her house. In a moment of anger, she hurled a stone at another young girl named Maude, killing her. The death weighed on her entire life, as everyone in the small town knew who she was and what she had done. She practically locked herself in her late parents’ house, where she created fantasy worlds out of models to escape the darkness that was her own. When the aliens see all this, they seem surprised by it and discuss something among themselves. Then they decide not only to spare her a painful death, but in an eerie finale to give her a new chance at a life she could only dream of.
Brynn joins the Alien Society in “No One Will Save You”
Image via HuluThroughout the film, we had seen the aliens take over the bodies of some people in the community through creatures that lodged themselves in their throats. This even happened to Brynn once before she ripped it out. But now that the aliens have seen what happened to her, they decide that she could become part of the community they are rebuilding. She now has all the friends she never had for most of her life. We see this when she gets to take part in a dance sequence reminiscent of classic musicals. Sure, they’re aliens puppeteering the corpses of the deceased they killed. But hey, beggars can’t be choosers. While that may sound like a flippant way to describe the ending, that’s actually not the case, as there’s a deliberately dark sense of humor to the whole thing. In an interview about said ending with the editor-in-chief of Collider Steve Weintraub about this conclusion after an early screening, writer-director Brian Duffield gave an answer that was equal parts sincere and cheeky.
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I really wanted to direct a musical but no one would let me, so it’s a joke. No, I knew the ending had to have something common for Brynn. That, and I love the character Brynn, and I know Kaitlyn does too, and I think we were both really protective of her. She was already struggling with a lot of emotional things before the movie started, and then we just kept kicking her ass the entire movie. It felt like you could do that – and I love A24 – but you could do the real slap in the face by ending with her death or whatever and give everyone the hard thing, but I liked them just too much to pour more salt on so many wounds. So I wanted her to definitely be better off at the end of the film than she was at the beginning, and I wanted her to have some kind of community element because that’s such a big part of the film that she doesn’t have a community. Then it occurred to me: What kind of community thing would this be? And I was like, “Oh, she’d probably have a dance…” but that’s too crazy, and then I never had another idea. It was in the script and I kept thinking, “Someday someone is going to tell me no,” and then, no, it never happened.
“No One Will Save You” offers a “happy” ending
Image via 20th Century StudiosSo there you have it from the director himself. Eat your heart out on A24 horror films, this one gets a moderately happy ending. At least as happy as one can be when the world as we know it appears to have been completely destroyed by aliens. Of course, it’s all about that tension, because any kind of joy that appears on Brynn’s face as she dances with her new alien friends is made eerie by the fact that they’re essentially just shells of their former selves. I don’t want to go into it too much, but it reflects the false world that Brynn created. Just like her role models, this is more of an approach to life and friendship than reality. It is a fantasy that documents the terrible reality of everything that happened to her. Despite the fact that she has found a community, the existence she leads now isn’t all that different from the one in which she began the film. It may seem that she is now freed from loneliness, but she has just traded one constructed reality for another. However, this new storybook world is based on the bones of humanity’s destruction. But hey, if you can overlook the blank eyes and the thing crawling in her throat, the guy she’s dancing with is definitely a cute guy.
No One Will Save You is now streaming on Hulu.