No One Will Save You Parent Guide

An incident in her teens made Brynn (Kaitlyn Dever) the town pariah, and although she’s isolated, she doesn’t have anywhere else to go. Since her mother’s death, Brynn has lived alone in her family home on the edge of town – but she’s about to have company. She wakes up with something scuttling around her house, something with unnaturally long limbs, huge eyes, and telekinetic powers. While she manages to kill the intruder, it soon becomes clear that he wasn’t the first – and won’t be the last. Brynn, on the other hand, is very much on her own. No one can save Brynn now but Brynn.

The film is presented almost completely without dialogue, with a couple of consequences. First, it forces you to actually pay some attention to what you’re watching. You can’t just zone out and play games on your phone while you listen to the characters gleefully spouting exposition. It also leaves the audience with a little more leeway to draw their own conclusions about the character – and I say character, singular, since Brynn is essentially the only human person on screen for most of the film. Your individual interpretation of the themes and events of the film might differ from mine, but I enjoy the process of coming to my own conclusions, and I think the film does a good job of suggesting interesting ideas without force feeding them to the audience like an overzealous mother bird.

The downside of all this mute storytelling is that the movie can feel dull in parts and uncanny in others. There are a few scenes which feel downright off without dialogue, situations in which people should be speaking with one another. It also leaves our lead actor with little to do but look scared, hide, and whimper – something for which I think she could lock down an Olympic medal. The film also wears its inspirations on its sleeve (Close Encounters of the Third Kindsprings to mind), but the visual similarities don’t continue into the plot: This is darker, more intense, and much creepier than Spielberg’s sci-fi classic.

Parents relieved by the complete absence of profanity, drug use, or sexual content might be less than thrilled with the film’s violence. Even with a PG-13 rating, you’re going to see some fairly gnarly violence between both human and alien characters, making this a poor choice for young or sensitive viewers. There isn’t a lot of graphic violence - maybe a half dozen incidents across the film - but it makes up for what it lacks in volume with a very visceral sense of how much everything hurts. No One Will Save You may not be for everyone, but I think it’s worth watching nonetheless: Love it or hate it, it will certainly give you something to talk about later.