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Disney+‘s No One Will Save You is the new film directed by Love & Monsters, The Babysitter, Jane Got a Gun and Insurgent writer Brian Duffield. It is a tense alien home invasion thriller that plays on established sci-fi conventions while painting an intriguing portrait of its sweet but enigmatic protagonist.

Then suddenly it isn’t.

If I were being uncharitable I would suggest that the ending jars massively with everything that has come before but even if you are happy to go with Duffield’s vision, it is a huge tonal shift from everything that has come before. It’s not like Annihilation or 10 Cloverfield Lane though, where otherworldly visitors reveal themselves to be responsible for everything that has come before, or War of the Worlds where the invaders are randomly defeated by something that has not been a part of the story until the denouement. The aliens here seem to have an incredible change of heart, inexplicably changing their mission parameters and allowing the Earth inhabitants they had been terrorising to live in a new unexpected harmony. If there is another similarly themed film to compare this to, I would have to say it is Chicken Little.

Up until this point Kaitlyn Dever’s Brynn has been fighting off classic looking grey spacemen as they break into her house with the apparent intention of killing or abducting her. All the while a mystery around why the rest of the town she lives in seems to have ostracised her unwinds, related to some event between her and her childhood BFF. When it transpires that she accidentally killed the kid in a fit of rage during an argument, it is no surprise as we have seen her violently dispatch three aliens by this stage. I don’t know why she’s not in prison as she is clearly still prone to dangerous outbursts of violence. I’m not sure the first alien even provoked her, maybe the others were only after her because she buried a model church in their brothers head.

Then, after they have finally caught her and scanned her troubled brain (the contents of which we see in a sequence of dreamlike fantasies and memories) they inexplicably let her go, dropping her back on the grass in a fit of giggles.

What follows is a coda where she is seen delivering home made goods to her now friendly neighbours before joining with them at some kind of jolly community dance party. It’s not the final scene I’d expected.

My first reading was that she was still captive on the alien spacecraft and these were her ongoing imaginings of a life she was no longer going to live. Kind of like an ongoing death vision, similar to the end of The Piano or Gravity. (😉)

Brian Duffield has talked about these closing moments in interviews though and apparently she is safe back on terra firma with all of the people around her being under alien control. The purpose of this is for the Martians to observe and learn from her as she goes about her activities. This is why their ships are still floating around above. I didn’t get this while I was watching it and I still like my reading better.

The very last shot is of Brynn breaking the fourth wall and gesturing to camera, as if to say that we as the audience are spying on her and judging her social interactions in the same way. I’m not sure that metaphor totally works though, it’s a nice idea but the execution is off.

None of this should be taken as criticism, I applaud any filmmaker who provides an audacious ending and up until this point No One Will Save You is an gripping, well paced and exciting monster flick. I’m just not sure it totally worked for me and I wanted to discuss it, which is what I am doing here.