Blue and red rays and other important symbols of the movie No one will save you (2023): movie meaning, ending explanation, plot summary, description, similar movies.
Country: USA
Genre: sci-fi, drama, thriller
Year of production: 2023
Director: Brian Duffield
Actors: Kaitlyn Dever, Lauren L. Murray, Zack Duhame, Dane Rhodes.
The meaning of the movie No one will save you, at first, does not seem to claim any depth. The picture as if collects all stereotypes about the alien invasion of Earth and realizes them in the format of a hermetic thriller. However, closer to the finale, the movie still gives a reason for reflection, and on a specific topic – working through psychological traumas.
What the movie’s about?
Let’s make a parsing of the content of the movie “No One Will Save You”, paying attention to the details that may have remained unclear after the first viewing.
We are introduced to the main character – a girl named Brynn. She lives alone in a two-story house outside the nearest town, engaged in tailoring.
Walking out of the house one day, Brynn notices the grass dried up in the shape of a perfect circle. On her way to town, she stops to wave to her neighbor. However, when he sees her, he turns away and walks away. After loading packages for customers in the mailbox, Brynn visits her mother’s grave. Coming to her car, the girl sees a couple walking nearby – it’s Sheriff Collins and his wife. Brynn immediately hides to avoid being seen by them.
At home, the girl rests, ignoring the intrusive calls from malevolent people, and writes a letter to her friend Maude. A mail truck pulls up. The courier with apparent carelessness throws the package intended for Brynn on the ground. The girl picks it up. Inside the box is a miniature school building for a diorama of the town the heroine is assembling. Brynn spends the rest of the day doing chores, dancing alone, and continuing to write a letter for Maud.
The heroine goes to bed. During the night, something approaches the house. At one moment, all the electrical appliances in the house briefly turn on at once. The lights go out. But the noise forces the girl out of bed. Through the window Brynn notices the overturned garbage can and is about to go out, but realizes that someone has entered the house. The girl sees a silhouette and hears footsteps, sneaks back in, but the creaky floorboards give her away. The intruder heads toward the source of the noise, forcing the mistress to retreat to the bedroom. Brynn hides behind the bed. The door swings open and we see the intruder. It is an alien, fitting the classic description of humanoid space aliens in popular culture.
The intruder, unable to find the landlady, flies onto the roof through the window. A frightened Brynn goes downstairs to close the door. She hears footsteps on the roof. The electrical appliances suddenly turn on again, the radio and TV are working. The girl pulls the power cord to stop the noise. She tries to call for help on the phone, but it makes a strange sound.
An alien comes down the stairs, forcing Brynn to hide behind the refrigerator. The alien finds the girl. She tries to escape, but the alien uses telekinesis. He uses it to overturn the diorama assembled by the hostess and drags the girl to himself. In flight, Brynn instinctively stabs the piece of diorama in her hand into the alien’s head. The latter falls dead. The girl, gathering her thoughts, checks the corpse of the visitor. She covers it with a piece of cloth.
Brynn makes another attempt to call someone in the city, but there is still no connection. The house is de-energized. The girl heads to the car, but the battery is also dead. Brynn goes on foot. On the road, she sees an overturned mail van, which was probably also attacked by aliens. On neighboring lawns, Brynn sees faded grass just like the grass in her yard.
The girl makes her way to the police station, bumping into Sheriff Collins and his wife at the entrance. The latter, without saying a word, spits in Brynn’s face, after which the couple leaves. Realizing that help is not to be expected here, the girl runs away.
Brynn gets the idea to leave the town, and she gets on a bus. A few minutes later, the mailman we’ve already seen gets on. The girl sits down in another seat. Then the man grabs her by the shoulder, making strange noises. We see something foreign moving in his throat. In a panic, the girl pushes the mailman away. The latter is joined by another female passenger with a parasite inside her. The driver, noticing the mess in the cabin, abruptly stops the bus. Brynn gets out and rushes away. The man leisurely follows her.
The girl reaches the church, but the door is locked. Then she goes to the nearest cemetery and finds there a tombstone with the name Maude Collins – the very friend to whom she is writing the letter, the daughter of Sheriff Collins. According to the tombstone, the girl died at the age of twelve.
Strange storm clouds approach and Brynn runs towards her house. Along the way, she sees her neighbors staring up at the sky with their arms raised. Inside each of them sits a parasite.
At home, Brynn sees that the alien corpse is still in place, but there is a line of slime stretching from it. The girl builds makeshift barricades, lights candles and boils water on the gas stove. The aliens make themselves known again, ripping out the nails with telekinesis. A beam of blue light strikes the doorway, overturning the couch. It picks up the dead alien’s body and drags it outside. The beam shuts off. Brynn rushes into the basement, but the alien comes down after her. He uses telekinesis to snatch the scissors she took from the girl’s hands. The alien also takes a picture of Brynn and Maude as children. While he examines the picture, the girl escapes. She goes up to the first floor where another alien is located. The girl fights him off using, among other things, the boiling water she had prepared. At one point, Brynn almost gets hit by an alien beam, which magnetizes the bucket in her hands to the wall. The beam has no effect on the alien. Eventually Brynn manages to kill the alien with a mop and a closet door.
After getting out of the house, the girl encounters a huge alien the size of a house, moving on its limbs like a spider. Brynn tries to run away, but runs into the mailman. A flying saucer appears in the sky. “The spider transmits some kind of message to the pilot, causing a beam to light up. Brynn scratches the mailman’s arm and pushes him into the beam, which immediately lifts his body up. Realizing they’ve got the wrong guy, the aliens disconnect the device, throwing the captured man back to the ground. The saucer flies away.
“Spider” continues his pursuit, tangling in clotheslines and electrical wires. The girl escapes from him through the interior of the car. The alien gets stuck there, puncturing the gas tank with his foot. Noticing this, Brynn takes a lighter and lights the gasoline on fire. The car bursts into flames, killing the alien stuck in it.
Once again, the beam of alien light reappears, forcing Brynn back into the house. There, the girl climbs into the attic, where another alien enters. The stranger sees that there are many pictures of little Brynn and Maude, as well as letters that the heroine wrote to her dead friend. Trying to escape, Brynn is hit by the beam again, this time in red. The alien approaches Brynn, forcing her mouth open. The alien belches out a parasite with tentacles, which climbs into the girl’s mouth.
Suddenly Brynn wakes up terrified in her bed. There are no signs of struggle on her body or in the room. Unbelieving her happiness, the girl goes downstairs. The front door is in place, the diorama intact. Brynn steps out into the hallway and sees an adult Maude. The heroine apologizes to her friend. Realizing she is in an illusion, Brynn pulls the parasite out of herself and finds herself in the front yard. The parasite breaks free and a beam of yellow light rushes towards it. In it, the aliens create a clone of Brynn. The girl herself runs away without waiting for the process to end and unaware that there are dozens of saucers doing the same thing over the city.
The clone catches up with Brynn in the forest, stabbing her in the stomach with a piece of wood, after which he hugs the girl. However, the heroine does not intend to give up. She stabs the clone in the neck with a clerical knife and he dies. Now Brynn embraces the murdered and mourns her.
The wounded Brynn takes the road and again encounters the “spider”. The girl is trapped by an alien beam that transports her to a flying saucer where the aliens examine her.
One of the aliens touches Brynn’s forehead with his finger. The girl finds herself in her home. She sees herself as a child, building a diorama with her mother – this scene is immediately illuminated in blue. Stepping outside, Brynn sees police officers in a red-blue glow. Among them is a grief-stricken Sheriff Collins. The girl continues to delve into the depths of memory. She sees two teenage girls fighting. One (Maude) pushes the other (Brynn), whereupon the latter picks up a rock and hurls it at the offending girl. Maud drops dead. This scene is highlighted in red.
Brynn finds herself at a table across from a younger version of herself. The teenager writes her first letters to her murdered friend, The heroine touches the girl’s hand. She looks into her eyes, as if asking if she will let go of her guilt in the future. The backlight turns blue.
After finishing the captive’s memories, the aliens discuss what they have seen in their own language. Brynn is placed in the beam again and sent back – to the same place where she was abducted. Lying on the ground, the girl sees flashes of blue lights in the sky and smiles happily.
Time passes. Brynn is primping up at her house, getting ready for a party. She rides her bike into town, visiting her neighbors. Those synchronized neighbors wave back at her, making gagging noises. They clearly have alien parasites inside them.
Brynn dances with the other townsfolk in the evening in the central square like nothing has happened. Everyone around him looks happy and smiles, moving a little too coherently. The camera moves away, rising higher and higher. In the light of the setting sun we see the alien saucers floating slowly.
The meaning of the movie No One Will Save You
So, what happened in the movie “No One Will Save You”? We watched the heroine, who became an outcast in a small town because of the murder of her friend Maud in a state of passion committed in her childhood, ten years ago. The sudden attack of aliens, made the girl fiercely defend herself. However, Brynn ended up being captured by the aliens anyway. Those showed her traumatic memories of the murder and made the girl forgive herself.
The movie “No One Will Save You” can be conditionally divided into entertaining and instructive parts. In the entertaining part we just empathize with the heroine, trying to escape from stereotypical aliens (the director in an interview gave an explanation that he made them like that, because he felt the lack of sci-fi movies with such “classic” aliens). The meaning of this action is hardly worth parsing.
We can only pay attention to the differences in the appearance and “functionality” of the aliens, as well as the technology of their control over humans. As for the first, we observe several individuals. These are “invaders” (a small weasel and a giant “spider”) and “researchers” (the alien who became Brynn’s first victim, then the “professor” who injected her with the parasite and further directs the “therapy”, as well as the rest of the “assistants” in the plate). The director mentioned in interviews that he knew exactly what this or that individual was doing “back home”, but this backstory was not included in the movie.
Regarding the control technology, the aliens implant their parasites in people, which collect all their memories and feelings. This information then goes to the clones – new personalities that replace and kill the old ones. Brynn, however, managed to avoid this fate. She defeated the clone, perhaps, thus honored to be in the next stage – a kind of psychotherapy.
In the instructive part we observe such “therapy”. The meaning of this action is the heroine’s forgiveness of herself. A special role here is played by highlighting the memories and mental actions of Brynn. The interpretation here is as follows. The traumatic and, probably, blocked in the consciousness memory (the direct murder of Maud) is “colored” red. The memory of Brynn’s mother as a marker of acceptance of her death is blue. The memory of the reaction of others after the unfortunate event is red-blue, which echoes the color of the police lights. When Brynn forgives her teenage self, the color red turns to blue, meaning the traumatic event turns into a worked through event. The girl is also brought back by the blue ray.
Note that the alien ray lights in the entertainment portion of the movie have a similar gradation. The blue beams are used to move inanimate objects or non-resisting creatures (e.g., an alien body, a pot, a mailman clone with a parasite inside). When a desperately resisting character is caught, she is in the red beam. The clone is created in the yellow ray.
Given the point of the cautionary tale, it’s tempting to extend it to the entire movie. Thus, the aliens could turn out to be projections of real therapists, Brynn’s clone could turn out to be a psychologically untraumatized version of her, and everything that happens could turn out to have happened in the heroine’s imagination. However, the director insists in interviews that what is shown (including the ending) is not a dream or fantasy of the girl.
To briefly describe the essence of the movie “No One Will Save You” (or rather, its instructive part) can be summarized in these words: “The main thing is to forgive yourself. Interpreting the title of the movie, we can add: no one will save you but yourself.
No One Will Save You Explanation of the ending
The director himself in an interview gives the following explanation of the ending of the movie “No One Will Save You”: it is a bad ending for the majority of the human race, but a good one for the heroine. She became much happier than she was at the beginning. From an outcast girl turned into a full-fledged member of society, albeit completely artificial and fully controlled by aliens (all we see around us are clones with parasites inside). Brynn after the unfortunate incident in her hometown felt like an alien, and now she found herself “in her own plate”.
Important correction: the heroine is probably not alone in feeling this way. The invasion probably happened all over the Earth. And there are thousands of outcasts like her. Yeah, and when the aliens brought Brynn back, we saw blue flashes. That’s probably evidence of the return of her kind.
The director also points out that he doesn’t limit the audience in his explanation of the ending. Everyone can offer their own clue and reveal the hidden meaning of the movie “No One Will Save You”.
Related movies
- Dark Skies (USA, 2013): a horror movie where the role of ghosts and monsters is taken by aliens;
- Signs (USA, 2002): M. Night Shyamalan’s cult film about an alien invasion;
- Invasion of the Body Snatchers (USA, 1955): a sci-fi classic about aliens creating human doppelgangers to invade Earth;
- A Quiet Place (USA, 2018): a family lives on a farm, fearing monsters that react to any rustle;
- Of Silence (USA, 2014): a deaf girl defends herself from an attack by a maniac in her home.
