Why No One Will Save You Went With A More Traditional Alien Design And Evolved It [Exclusive]
Brian Duffield is one of the most exciting genre filmmakers working in Hollywood today. His screenplay for the Western "Jane Got a Gun" was a gem that got tarnished by behind-the-scenes chaos. He bounced back with the clever horror romp "The Babysitter," and enjoyed a breakout 2020 with his scripts for "Love and Monsters" and "Underwater," and, most importantly, his directorial debut "Spontaneous." Duffield's adaptation of Aaron Starmer's darkly satiric novel about teenage romance in the age of school shootings hit the bullseye; it was hilarious and heartbreaking in equal measure, and, for a movie about kids inexplicably exploding, didn't skimp on the gore. At all. The film went hard because it had to.
Duffield's latest, "No One Will Save You," plays just as rough. The film stars Kaitlyn Dever as a young woman who lives by herself in a roomy rural house, which, one dark night, is broken into by a visitor from another planet. She successfully fights off her attacker, but, because she is evidently a pariah in her small town, is reluctant to report the incident to the authorities. Duffield deftly balances the personal and planetary implications of this mysterious invasion. What did our protagonist do to earn her neighbors' vitriol, and what the heck are these decidedly unfriendly extraterrestrials up to?
"No One Will Save You" takes place in the present, but Dever's character's house is strangely out of time. She owns a flatscreen television, but still uses a phone with a rotary dial. There's a throwback quality to her environs. So it's only appropriate that Duffield went retro with the design of his predatory aliens.
The return of the Gray
If you're a sci-fi fan of a certain age, you might very well cheer when get our first full view of the alien, and it's a Gray! You may not know the term, but you know the look: pale skin, slender body, beady black eyes, and an oval head. They're based on the creatures allegedly discovered at Roswell, New Mexico in 1947, and they became such an ingrained type that filmmakers veered away from depicting them on screen.
Being a hardcore sci-fi fan, Duffield had to bring the Gray back for "No One Will Save You." In an exclusive interview with /Film's Ethan Anderton, he discussed his affection for the classic extraterrestrial design. Per Duffield:
"I love the gray. It's maybe my favorite monster design. Maybe it's real, based on Roswell, who knows? I just love it. I felt like there had been such a lack of it for a really long time. I would hear about an alien movie coming, and then I would see the trailer and be kind of disappointed that it was this other thing. After so many of those trailers and movies that I loved, I was like, I just miss my boy. It came out of being like, 'Where is this?'"
These aren't your grandparents Grays
Grays are still prevalent in pop culture. As Duffield noted in the interview, we use them as emojis and keychains. And they're so familiar, cute even, that we're taken aback when Dever kills one in the first act of the film. Poor guy. But as they keep on coming, Duffield does something kind of miraculous: he makes these visual cliches scary again. He also gives them contortionist qualities; they can bend themselves into bizarre configurations, and, if need be, launch themselves down a hallway at top speed.
Most amusingly, there's a Gray hierarchy. Generally, the taller they are, the more important they seem to be within their society. And while we see them speak amongst themselves, Duffield wisely resists the temptation to subtitle their interactions (even though their utterances constitute the majority of the spoken dialogue in the script). In fact, Duffield's script is so ambiguous that, even when we've seen them take over human bodies, we're not entirely sure that their motives are evil. Maybe they have a perfectly practical reason for this invasion.
I think the ending of "No One Will Save You" is open to interpretation, but, good or bad, it's great to have the Grays back on the scene. Well done, Mr. Duffield.