In September of this year, a new alien movie was released. No One Will Save You was described by many to be a thrilling, attention-catching film (the many being random TikTokers perspectives). Unfortunately, even with all the aliens and a seemingly promising plot, I was severely let down. 

As someone who is used to watching movies within the horror and thriller genre, similar to Scream or anything from the Conjuring movies, I thought that throwing aliens into the mix would prove to be an exciting time. I already assumed that this probably would not be as good as my typical favorites, but there was just something that made this an excruciating watch.  

I honestly went into this movie thinking that the concept would be extremely interesting. The basis of the movie is meant to follow a girl named Brynn, played by Kaitlyn Dever, who finds herself awoken by a strange noise. As she looks outside her open window (while she was sleeping?), she notices that her trash cans were knocked over by an unknown source. Rather than just going back to sleep, like a regular person would, she makes the strange decision to go check it out.

During her inspection, Brynn finds herself encountering her first alien. Unfortunately, she still refuses to rationally think and somehow manages to catch its attention. This leads to a mostly captivating, high-speed scene between her trying to escape and the alien trying to stop her. By the end of the scene though, the alien (with its telepathy) holds her up and spins Brynn to face it. At this moment, a piece of wood our main character grabbed hold of stabs the alien in the head, causing it to die quickly. Now, I may not be an expert on aliens, but them dying like a regular human being was something that I never would have imagined.  

Now, one would think that this sequence would be Dever’s characters main conflict, but that is an assumption one should never make. As the movie continues, we get to watch our main character struggle and fight with more aliens. Even though each alien continued to get bigger and bigger, Brynn was able to persevere through all of them. During the whole film, she had of killed somewhere between four and five aliens.  

Part of the reason this movie did not resonate with me is because it seems unrealistic to what aliens would be like. While we may not know anything about aliens, I personally could not see an alien being able to be killed by regular items, such as the wood off a birdhouse. My other issue was the lack of dialogue. Not having any conversations throughout the movie did pave the way for the cinematography to be what forms the storyline. It allowed the camerawork to have the chance to show what words would only tell us, but it also made the film seem longer than it actually was.  

In all honesty, I think that there was a lot of potential with this concept, it just was not elaborated on enough for me. There were parts that either droned on for an extensive amount of time or went by within an instant. I also feel as if the small amount of dialogue they did use could have been used in a better way. I completely understand that the overall message behind the film was overcoming personal trauma and grief, but there were better scenarios they could have put our main character in.  

At the end of the day, it is up to one’s interpretation on whether they enjoyed the movie or not, but personally, this one was not for me. I wish the producers spent more time developing Brynn as a character or her interactions with the aliens instead of overextending unneeded scenes. I was also hoping that the ending would not leave the audience questioning too much or with an empty feeling, but this movie somehow managed to do both.