Aliens have arrived, and that may be just one of Kaitlyn Dever’s problems, in the new trailer for “No One Will Save You.” The sophomore effort from director Brian Duffield, whose “Spontaneous” was an unusually of-the-moment horror parable for kids growing up in an era of mass shootings and climate change, arrives on Hulu courtesy of 20th Century Studios on Sept. 22.
Dever (“Booksmart,” “Dopesick”) stars as Brynn, who puts up a surprising amount of resistance when aliens show up on her doorstep. The trailer cleverly starts with a tease that the film will be a home invasion thriller before revealing that the invaders aren’t from our planet. We then get a montage of our heroine doing her best to fend off the intergalactic menace, including period details like a rotary telephone and what looks to be 1970s wardrobes.
“I think there’s a deeply buried feeling that every alien invasion movie could turn out to be true because they remain such an unknown in our daily lives,” Duffield said in a news release accompanying the trailer. “As our world careens more and more out of control, maybe there’s even a desire that there’s something out there smarter than us that can help put us on a more sane path.”
The film looks to belong in the sub-genre where earth-shattering events are seen entirely from the point of view of a somewhat isolated protagonist. Think, offhand, “Signs,” “Cloverfield” and “Pontypool,” whereby we only know as much about the global perils as our heroes do, and we learn only as they learn. It’s also a way to make a movie about a big-scale disaster on a comparatively reasonable budget.
“I wanted the movie to take the lead of a small intimate character study and drop an alien invasion on top of them,” Duffield said in the statement. “The end of the world won’t only be for those that are ready for it, and the idea of an alien movie rudely bursting the bubble our character has spent years building and cultivating felt like a unique way to tell a favorite story.”
From 20th Century Studios, “No One Will Save You” features music by composer Joseph Trapanese. Tim White, Trevor White, Allan Mandelbaum and Duffield produce; Dever and Joshua Throne executive produce. “No One Will Save You” begins streaming on Sept. 22, 2023, exclusively on Hulu in the U.S., Star+ in Latin America, and Disney+ in all other territories. Let’s hope it fares better than Dever’s last Hulu original, the delightful but recently disappeared “Rosaline.”
