No One Will Save You (2023)
★★½ — No One Will Save You (2023)
"(Gasp)" "(Chittering)" Those are the kind of subtitles that tell you exactly what you're in for with No One Will Save You, and honestly, they sum up the experience pretty well. Not awful. Not brilliant. Somewhere in the middle, doing something a bit different, but leaving you wondering if different is quite enough.
The big hook here, and it is a genuinely interesting one, is the near-total absence of dialogue. Kaitlyn Dever carries almost the entire film on her face and her body, running, hiding, reacting, surviving. And fair play to her, she does a decent job of it. It's a bold choice. The problem is that when you step back afterwards and think about what you actually learned from anyone's mouth, you realise the answer is almost nothing. That's fine in theory, filmmakers have pulled it off before, but here it starts to feel less like a stylistic statement and more like a way of avoiding having to write much. Looking back, the silence is kinda weird rather than purposeful.
What does work, and I want to be fair here, is the slow drip of Brynn's backstory. You piece together her history with the town and the people around her gradually, through glances and photographs and the way others treat her, and that mystery keeps you invested when the alien stuff threatens to become repetitive. There's something genuinely sad underneath all the genre mechanics, and the film is at its most interesting when it leans into that.
But then the aliens. Here's my big question: why are they even here? What are they actually after? If you enjoy a good alien horror, I reviewed Fire in the Sky a while back, and that film makes the extraterrestrial threat feel genuinely purposeful and terrifying. Here, the creatures are visually fine, there's clearly effort gone into them, but their motivation is murky to the point of frustration. You can have an enigmatic alien presence and still give the audience enough to chew on. This one just sort of... arrives, menaces, and the film keeps moving without ever really answering the obvious questions you're asking.
The ending will divide people, and I can see what it's going for thematically. It tries to tie the alien invasion to Brynn's internal emotional state in a way that's ambitious, maybe even a little clever. But for me it raises more questions than it resolves, and not in the satisfying, thought-provoking way. More in the "wait, what?" way.
It's a nice take on the alien genre, I'll give it that. It's doing something slightly different with the format, stripping things back, putting the weight on performance and atmosphere. But nice and slightly different don't automatically make something great. Run of the mill is probably the most honest way I can put it. There are moments of genuine tension, a few images that stick, and Dever earns her money. It just never quite convinces you that it knows what it wants to say.
Two and a half stars. Worth a watch if you're curious, but don't expect it to haunt you.
Rating: ★★½ | Year: 2023 | Watched: 2025-05-10
Where to watch
Watch in the UK
Stream: Disney Plus
Physical: Amazon UK · Zavvi
Watch in the US
Stream: Hulu
Physical: Amazon US
Affiliate disclosure: Movies With Macca may earn a small commission on purchases or subscriptions started via these links. It costs you nothing extra.
Related on Movies With Macca
More from the 2020s: Mononoke the Movie: The Phantom in the Rain (2024) · Mononoke the Movie: Chapter II - The Ashes of Rage (2025) · The Long Walk (2025) · Americana (2023)
More horror: Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956) · Viy (1967) · Nightmare City (1980) · Angst (1983)
More science fiction: Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956) · Fantastic Planet (1973) · Nightmare City (1980) · The Long Walk (2025)
