These days, when a movie is released in the theaters, you might have 2 weeks to get to it before it's unceremoniously yanked. Even blockbusters can get steamrolled when the next blockbuster comes out.
Movies released directly to a streaming service can have even less fanfare; you may not even hear about them, and they vanish from the service's splash screen in a matter of days. But I do try to make note of things that sound interesting, to circle back to at some later date. One such movie was the 2023 sci-fi horror No One Will Save You.
Brynn is the shunned outcast in a small town, keeping mostly to herself in her home. But one night, that home is invaded by gray aliens. She stands up for herself and survives the night... but soon finds that the aliens haven't just attacked her. And the attack was only the first.
It's not that I heard "alien horror movie" and was instantly sold. Interested, sure, but that alone wasn't enough to put No One Will Save You on my "to-watch list." My attention was hooked by one other thing I heard about the movie (at the time it was dropped on Hulu, back in late 2023): the movie has virtually no dialogue at all. The way that so many horror movies come down to a monster vs. a "final girl" in an all-action, no dialogue showdown? Someone had made that for an entire 93-minute movie. A Quiet Place, to the nth degree. Would it even work?
Sort of. It's a fascinating formal exercise to write a movie without dialogue. How do you convey backstory to the audience? How do you flesh out the characters? Or, for that matter, even provide the characters' names? In these aspects of the exercise, writer/director Brian Duffield has done an excellent job with this movie. "Show, don't tell" is the mantra of good storytelling, and Duffield does a masterful job of this with the main character of Brynn. Over the course of the film, we're filled in bit by bit about who she is, that the town hates her, and ultimately why the town hates her -- all without a single word of dialogue.
It's in the horror movie elements that I found No One Will Save You lacking. The various action sequences are just a grab bag of horror tropes -- in particular, the ones that would work in a movie without dialogue. You know how some action blockbusters feel like four or five preconceived set pieces with lazy spackle connecting them? I found this movie to be the opposite: a character story carefully doled out in four or five major moments, with horror scenes smeared in the cracks between.
The behavior of the aliens in this movie makes no sense. And while that's a critique easy to explain away ("they're aliens, so what they do won't necessarily make sense to humans"), it doesn't leave the narrative any less rocky. From one scene to the next, the capabilities of the aliens seem to shift: they're always exactly capable enough to seem menacing, while never doing everything they could. If they did, Brynn couldn't get away and keep the movie going. And if their capabilities confuse, don't even try to guess at their motives.
So overall, I found No One Will Save You to be a disappointment. I'd grade it a C- overall. Yet I wanted to blog about it anyway, because I was impressed with the way it told a complete story for one character -- with history, stakes, and growth -- without using dialogue. I feel like there are lessons in there for other writers... not even to try as a similar formal constraint, but as applicable to more conventional storytelling.
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