No One Will Save You’s Clever Ending Critiques the Self-Centered 21st Century Protagonist

Hulu’s newly released No One Will Save You, from Spontaneous writer/director Brian Duffield, is an exercise in clever misdirection from its opening moments. Both refreshingly direct in premise and slyly subversive in its evolution and conclusion, it relies on nothing so much as the audience’s own assumptions to turn its final moments into a revelation and critique of its own main character. Duffield has skillfully employed this particular brand of cinematic judo to use our own momentum against us, understanding exactly how we’ll likely perceive Kaitlyn Dever’s silent protagonist, right up to the moment he springs a biting denouement 93 minutes in the making, leaving us laughing at the incredulity of it all.

Our dialogue-free protagonist is Brynn, a nebulously twenty-something woman seemingly living alone in a spacious but creaky old country house, where she works as a seamstress, constructs a model town a la Beetlejuice, drinks wine and generally avoids any and all human contact. The opening moments of No One Will Save You depict her home life as seemingly satisfying, until she has to venture into town for the smallest of tasks, like dropping a package in a mailbox. That simple chore is presented more like a gauntlet of anxiety Brynn is made to run, with her agonizing about choices such as what to wear and practicing her timid, fake smiles and waves in the mirror before embarking. Soon, we see why she is overwhelmed by the prospect of seeing any other person: Brynn is something of a pariah in this town, or at least a figure of distrust and scrutiny. The scowls of random passerby clearly cut her to the bone, and she lacks the courage to speak up in her defense, hoping that an insincere smile and wave will someday be greeted with affirmation rather than rejection.

The reason for Brynn’s spurning likewise becomes clear soon enough: She has a dead childhood friend, Maude, who passed away when they were in their mid-teens, and Brynn is clearly both responsible for the incident and guilty to this day. Worse, Maude’s parents still live in the town and aren’t shy in their hatred of Brynn, while our protagonist has also lost her one remaining piece of support with the recent death of her mother. And thus, she ended up alone, rattling along in her Mom’s old house while trying to stay out of sight of the town that loathes her. And that, folks, is when the alien invaders abruptly show up.

Yes, alien invaders. One can only assume that No One Will Save You must have been pitched as a feature-length adaptation of The Twilight Zone’s classic “The Invaders,” a likewise wordless story about a woman in a farmhouse, under siege by miniature alien spaceships. Decades later, that kernel of an idea has returned and been given the high-concept feature film treatment, which boils down to the following: When hostile aliens attack, can this solitary, seemingly meek woman find the fortitude necessary to survive?

This kind of high-concept simplicity and brevity of premise is a welcome thing for the film world these days, a pleasant throwback to the concise kind of elevator pitch that spawned so many beloved B-movies in the 1980s in particular. It’s comfortably familiar, the kind of church-mouse-into-badass-warrior transformation we’ve seen again and again over the decades. And yet, in the case of No One Can Save You, that premise functions both as a simple promise of pulpy entertainment and as misdirection preying on the audience’s built-in familiarity with tropes, in order to frame our perception of Brynn has a heroine.

Suffice to say, there are ways that a character in Brynn’s position, dropped into this sort of story, is meant to behave. We expect this kind of protagonist to steadily grow from timid and unsure of themselves to battle-hardened and confident, baptized in the line of fire and emerging far stronger on the other side. We expect them to be selfless, to confront their inner demons and conquer them while simultaneously being ready to sacrifice themselves for the lives of others. And perhaps more than anything, we expect this kind of protagonist to act as a bastion of defiance against the alien invaders, a champion of humankind who steadfastly stands up for our way of life and very right to exist. This protagonist fights for our freedom! They are the best of us, or at least the most human of us, proud of the human spirit in all its messy glory. This is the stuff that so wonderfully makes up the drunken speech at the end of Edgar Wright’s The World’s End, as Simon Pegg gleefully tells off a vastly superior alien intellect.

But this isn’t really all that realistic, is it? Perhaps it’s reasonable to expect the average person to “fight back” against an inhuman intruder in terms of physically defending themselves and saving their own skin, but when it comes to saving the rest of us, is that not outside the reasonable realm of what one could probably hope to achieve? And what if you find yourself coming to the conclusion that there isn’t much in humanity you feel any particular impetus to save? What if your protagonist ultimately doesn’t look much farther beyond their day-to-day experience? Well, then you end up with the ending of No One Will Save You.

It’s not that Brynn doesn’t fight ferociously against the threat to her life. She does, first instinctually and then with planning and vicious execution when the aliens return. As long as the intruders seem intent on killing her, she refuses to back down or give up in the physical and mental battle against them.

But then a curious thing happens. When Brynn is eventually abducted by the alien craft, they psychically probe her memories and emotions, witnessing the history of her trauma and seemingly coming to a greater understanding of people, or at least of Brynn personally, in the process. The aliens then return her to the ground, having presumably gotten what they wanted … and they notably do not try for a second time to implant her with a mind-controlling, tentacled creature, which they’ve successfully used to enslave and puppet all the other people in her town.

In a conventional narrative, this is about when the protagonist would embark on a last-ditch suicide mission to bring down the alien mothership and save the entire species from becoming a race of walking thralls. But that’s not what Brynn does. Instead, we jump ahead a short time to find that Brynn is now back to happily living in her mother’s creaky old farm house. And she no longer fears her trips into town–rather, she relishes them, because they’re now filled with smiles and friendly welcomes from her psychically enslaved former neighbors, all of whom are implanted with alien creatures. Our protagonist displays no horror or revulsion, seeing them this way. She’s even taught them to dance, in fact! Brynn is happier than she’s ever been, having embraced her role as a collaborator with the alien overthrow of Earth, a quisling that the victorious aliens now trust to stand idly by because they understand that they don’t need to implant her to subdue her. All they needed to do was offer her a more friendly and welcoming world than the one she perceived around her before.

Thus, the actual battle of No One Will Save You is ultimately not between a girl and some aliens, or even between Brynn and her own guilt, which would be the expected subtext (and it is certainly present as well). Rather, what it all ultimately comes down to in the final minutes is the audience’s realization that the true battle has been between Brynn’s somewhat naïve (but understandable) desire for social acceptance and her inherent duty toward “stepping up” as a traditional heroine to defend humanity and human values. And she elects not to! She makes the rarest of all choices for the protagonist of an American screenplay: She chooses to simply let things play out and make the best of the situation. She considers only herself.

As we puzzle over this ending, we have to consider that Brynn’s emotional attachment to the people around her–to humanity itself–has apparently been severed far more deeply than we realize. She feels no responsibility at all toward these people, or camaraderie with them. Not once does she try to free anyone else from alien control. This is likely because Brynn has forgotten what a genuine emotional connection is like in the years since Maude’s death when she was a teen, and her own mother’s subsequent death. In other words, Brynn has gotten desperate for a connection. She’s gotten desperate enough, in fact, to accept a facsimile of sociality with inhuman creatures wearing the faces of her neighbors, as long as those faces are smiling. She’s willing to lie to herself, to effectively trick herself into thinking that because she can now see Maude’s parents in public without breaking into a cold sweat or being spit on, that it means she’s been “forgiven” by them for killing their daughter. The aliens are letting her believe what she desperately wants to believe.

Brynn has always lived in her own little world. Now, her world just has a bunch of friendly alien slaves in it.

In other words, Brynn has lost her goddamn mind. She’s witnessed the fall of humanity, an apparent extinction event, and decided that she doesn’t really care that any of it happened. Things are easier now! Her social anxiety is a thing of the past! That’s what matters, right?

In a typical writer’s hands, the progression of this film’s protagonist might have seen her reforging a connection to the town, her neighbors and her humanity, ultimately finding redemption among them, or at the very least asserting her independence by realizing she doesn’t care any more about seeking forgiveness, even as she fights for their liberation. But Duffield uses the absence of dialogue to invite his audience to increasingly project their own false, invented narrative onto Brynn, allowing us to assume she would care about priorities such as freedom or setting her world right. We look at her situation, and what she’s up against, and we’re meant to see superficially similar characters like Alien’s Ellen Ripley, or 10 Cloverfield Lane’s Michelle. We expect her to embody the same unrealistic resilience, because that’s what makes for a good story — a classic, heroic narrative.

And then Brynn goes and shocks us by instead being … a deeply flawed person with a tenuous grip on reality. She succeeds in physically defending herself for a time, but the trial ultimately gets the best of her. In the face of insurmountable odds, without any plot armor to save her or deus ex machina to undo the global threat, she does what any of us would genuinely do if we were there: She capitulates. The aliens recognize she isn’t a threat if left alone, and they go off to finish their presumptive toppling of the entire planet. The species is destroyed. The bad guys win. But at least Brynn has some new friends to dance with.

This isn’t a condemnation of Brynn, though that’s probably how it appears. If anything, it’s a statement of understanding; an attempt to describe this character in an accurate way by simply observing what she does rather than projecting our trope-derived expectations onto her. And what she does is look out for herself: No more, no less.

It’s difficult for an audience steeped in more traditional tropes to expect or accept this kind of protagonist, one with a realistically self-centered worldview. By no means does this kind of writing automatically make the likes of No One Can Save You superior to more traditional or heroic stories, but it does make Duffield’s tight thriller stand out in a way that is likely to delight some viewers while infuriating others. Perhaps some will look at this movie and see a damning reflection of themselves, recognizing that they too have little if any empathy for the world around them. Oh, who am I kidding? That kind of self-reflection is about as rare as a person genuinely prepared to fight off an alien horde to save humanity.

For better or worse, though, Brian Duffield has seen our true natures. It may be a cynical point, but it’s also yielded one of the year’s most sneakily scary films, when you take the true horror of its ending to heart.

Jim Vorel is Paste’s resident genre guru. You can follow him on Twitter for much more film content.