No One Will Save You

My Grey Heaven

No One Will Save You
Directed by Brian Duffield
USA 2023
Star Thrower Entertainment

Warning: Spoilers throughout.

Just a quick shout out to a movie from a couple of years ago called No One Will Save You and, also a bit of a warning because, in order to discuss this one properly, I think it’s necessary to talk about what happens at the end (most of the rest of the spoilers in here are just stuff you will figure out from the trailer). Also, I found out one of my comparisons I’m going to make, after I watched this and read the trivia section on the IMDB... well it turns out that Stephen King tweeted out the exact same connection to a specific episode of a specific TV show that had been in my mind when I was looking at this one. So glad I’m on the same page as everyone else here.

This is a movie about a young woman called Brynn (played by Kaitlyn Dever) who lives alone in her late parents large house, slightly remotely on the edge of a forest, a short bike or car ride from her local town (which she visits as little as possible). She is despised by a good deal of the population of the town for something which has happened in her past some ten or more years earlier. Something which Brynn has to live with every day.

And then, one night, as she is trying to sleep, she hears something downstairs. It’s a home invasion but, as she sneaks around trying to see who it is... she soon realises the question is not who but what’ is it? Which, as you’ll know if you’ve seen the trailer, is an alien. And not just any alien, this is obviously based on the greys (or Zeta Reticulans) of popular, modern UFO folklore (and don’t get me started... I gave up researching these guys years ago because of too many sleepless nights). That first night becomes a fight for survival but, survive Brynn does, after accidentally managing to kill said alien.

However, when she goes into town the next day, she finds signs that she’s not the only one who has been visited in the night. Indeed, not only does she change her mind about reporting it because of the reception she gets at the police station, but she’s chased by two humans who are obviously alien/human hybrids. And the rest of the film is about the second night, when more aliens come for her (and the rest of the local population).

Now I’ll get to that spoilery ending in a minute but, the film made me think of two specific sci-fi/horror tales of yesteryear. One of them is Invasion Of The Body Snatchers, based on the way aliens take control of humans with a living seed creature vomited from their mouths (in this case) into their victims. But the other thing was (and this is the thing Stephen King clocked too), the similarity to one of my top five episodes of The Twilight Zone, specifically The Invaders, which has a wonderful score by Jerry Goldsmith. That episode has a cast of one (Agnes Moorehead) and depicts a woman who is victim to a similar home invasion from teeny, tiny creatures. I won’t give the twist of that episode away (which is a humdinger) but, in order to make that twist work, there is no dialogue in the episode at all and it’s all set in the woman’s home.

Well, No One Wil Save You is definitely cut from the same cloth. The whole thing is practically wordless (other than a source song and some alien vocal sounds, there are only five words spoken throughout the whole film) and, asides from a few forest and town scenes, the majority takes place on Brynn’s property.

And it’s a well made suspenseful film, it has to be said. You will feel for the lead as she battles, with far inferior means, to stay out of the clutches of the aliens and, despite the revelations of what she did in the past, she’ll probably have your total sympathy (and that’s kind of the point in terms of leading to the ending of the movie too). And the greys themselves can be pretty terrifying, not just a one trick pony as they come in a variety of versions of increasing scariness. So there’s a definite feeling of unease as you watch Brynn fight for her life.

And so we come to the end... don’t read further unless you want to know.

By the end of the movie I felt kinda shortchanged by the conclusion... for all of thirty seconds... until I realised that this was a pretty good ending. When the aliens probe Brynn’s mind and discover how she’s repented for her accidental crime and had to live with the unforgiving towns folk, they spare her from being a human hybrid. Instead, with the planet now populated with human/alien hybrids, Brynn gets to live with them in her home town, teaching them how to be the best part of her human race, giving her a far easier and happier existence than when the Earth was populated by her own species. It’s kinda like what might have happened if the main protagonist of Invasion Of The Body Snatchers had let himself be reborn as an alien pod person, living in harmony (of a kind) with his fellow pod people... instead of what happened at the end of that movie. Here, Brynn has found her calling, continuing to live her life collecting doll houses for her diorama (where she watches her model townsfolk in a similar way to how the aliens hover in their flying saucers and monitor their new world) and teaching her new friends how to dance.

And that’s me done with that. No One Will Save You has a perfect ending for a pretty suspenseful film. Not the happy ending you might have wanted but, certainly a happy ending that Brynn deserved. And who needs humans anyway... horrible creatures. This one is definitely worth a watch, as far as I’m concerned.