It may have effectively come out of nowhere, but No One Will Save You has been sectioning off quite a big piece of the spotlight for itself in light of its release on Hulu, and rightfully so. Brian Duffield’s mind-bending sci-fi thriller is packed with twist after twist, delectably dissonant sound effects, and a cast of aliens that will probably end up being responsible for a surge in nightlight sales.
But the big talking point for everyone when it comes to No One Will Save You is its initially peculiar decision to swear off dialogue, and that’s hardly an exaggeration. Throughout its 93 minutes of runtime, Kaitlyn Dever’s protagonist Brynn speaks roughly 10 full words of dialogue, and only three of them are coherent in any way. On top of this, she’s the only character with any audible lines in the film, assuming no one has uncovered any sort of lexicon for the aliens’ language system just yet.
But, why did Duffield decide on such a conservative approach to dialogue, and why is it amazing?
For Duffield, that creative restriction brought out the best in both his filmmaking ability and Dever’s penchant for performance. In a recent interview with The Hollywood Reporter, he noted how, with the absence of dialogue, he was able to dive even deeper in crafting the film’s steady-yet-kinetic balance of clarity and ambiguity, and for those of you who have seen the film already, you know how important a balance that was to strike.
It was always about clarity. This is an ambitious movie that takes swings and plays with a fair amount of ambiguity. And so we had a lot of conversations about that fine line between being ambiguous versus unintentionally ambiguous versus annoying. It was making sure that the audience understood what we wanted them to know and what we wanted them to question.
He would also, in a separate interview with Entertainment Weekly, go on to praise Dever’s masterful performance as Brynn, whose literal and subtextual characterization was a key factor in the decision to avoid dialogue, and lauding her ability to “monologue with her eyes” in lieu of speaking—a talent of Dever’s that largely made the film soar the way it did.
It was a character thing where this person really wants a community and doesn’t think she’s deserving of one. It felt like that device just amplified her character. Most of the movie there’s not really a good reason for her to talk because she’s trying so hard to not make a sound. Also, when you have Kaitlyn Dever, she doesn’t need to say anything. She can monologue with her eyes in a really impressive way.
But No One Will Save You‘s minimal dialogue goes beyond bolstering the creative process and allowing Dever to flourish in a brand new way; right from the opening scene, Duffield makes it very clear that the picture will be more than capable of doing its own talking, and from there, the visual meat just gets juicier and juicer. Indeed, be it the psychedelic movements of the alien ships and weaponry, the twitchy movements of the extraterrestrials, or that first moment when the lights go out (if you know, you know), Duffield’s cinematography seems itself to be from another planet, and without too much dialogue to dissect, that’s even more apparent.
Furthermore—circling back to Dever’s performance—it wasn’t just how remarkably the Booksmart star delivered her performance, but the specifics of what the performance was/required that was bolstered by the lack of dialogue. When we meet Brynn, she’s a character effectively defined by the concept of grief; she has nowhere for her love to go, and love isn’t exactly in a hurry to find its way to her, either.
Dever, then, was tasked with carrying Brynn’s deceptively weighty, isolated brand of survival mode before the aliens even showed up, and that’s not a type of portrayal that words can do the heavy lifting for. Moreover, that first shade of Brynn molds and mutates throughout the film as her trauma becomes more raw and the straits become more dire, and Dever doesn’t just succeed in commanding such a metamorphosis; she elevates that shift with a physical performance that was seemingly begging to be let out, and No One Will Save You gave her (or rather, took away) just what she needed to do that.
It’s admittedly hard to say when or if Duffield realized he struck gold in choosing to keep his cast tight-lipped, but after No One Will Save You, it’s become more than apparent that his creative instincts are to be trusted whole-heartedly.
No One Will Save You is now streaming on Hulu, and in Disney+ in international territories via Star.
(featured image: Hulu)
