No One Will Save You director left his alien thriller open to interpretation, but without ‘cheaty stuff’
Hulu’s original science fiction movie No One Will Save You is an effective, creepy, and at times repulsive thriller, but it’s also openly positioned as a discussion-starter. Isolated small-town loner Brynn (Booksmartstar Kaitlyn Dever) encounters aliens, which she alternately fights and flees. Her situation keeps changing in ways that are sometimes hard to interpret, especially since there’s virtually no intelligible dialogue in the entire movie.
The aliens speak their own language, while Brynn, alone, rarely talks. There’s no one for her to compare notes with, or explain her experiences to. She wears her emotions on her face, and it’s easy to tell what she’s feeling. But how to tell whether the events that provoke those feelings are actually happening?
That’s certainly something writer-director Brian Duffield thought about extensively when developing the movie. He compares it to the Steven Spielberg movie Minority Report, in which Tom Cruise’s character is arrested, on evidence provided by precognitives, for a crime that hasn’t been committed yet. At one point in the film, he’s imprisoned in a future-tech stasis system.
“Everything after Tom Cruise goes in the cryo chamber, there’s that debate of Does this actually happen, or is the rest of the movie the sweetest dreams he’s ever experienced, like Tim Blake Nelson says?” Duffield tells Polygon. Much like another Philip K. Dick-derived movie, Total Recall, Minority Report can be taken entirely at face value — but it’s also possible to interpret part of the movie as a dream. The same goes for No One Will Save You as well, depending on how you look at certain events.
“There are definitely elements that aren’t spelled out,” Duffield says. “But I also wanted to do all the
Read more on polygon.com
