Nobody Will Save You
If you liked Kaitlyn Dever, the tomboy child of Tim Allen on Last Man Standing, this is the movie for you.
Dever, now 26, carries the entire movie. For 95% of the film, she's the only person on the screen. And for 99.5% of the film, she doesn't say a single word. Not one.
She's a recluse, dealing with some past trauma. Living alone, isolated in her childhood home (I think). One night her home is assaulted. Not by burglars or by rapists or anything like that, but by extra terrestrials.
The film borrows from many others. There's a little bit of Signs, a dash of ET, a smidge or two of Close Encounters, a dollop of A Quiet Place, and maybe even a splash of Invasion of the Body Snatchers.
The entire movie is Dever's Brynn fighting off the aliens as it slowly - very slowly - reveals the childhood trauma she's suffered.
I'll say this, Dever is a delight to watch. She does a more-than-credible job in the role and given that the entire story is told through her facial expressions, grunts and groans makes it even more impressive. She's fantastic.
The no dialogue thing was interesting. Part of it was natural because there was nobody for her to talk to. The cutesy things where she'd pick up the phone and take that inhale of a breath to begin speaking and then stop were funny - at least to me.
The complete lack of dialogue forced you to pay attention because if you looked away, you couldn't follow a conversation to know what was going on. I liked that because I'm sick to death of watching friends and family sit there scrolling on their phone while they are allegedly "watching" a movie. That won't happen here.
Dever elevated this film far beyond what it could have been. Without her performance, it's not much more than an average forgettable SyFy movie. I'm interested in seeing her in different, bigger roles. She should get that opportunity. It was a huge burden to carry an entire movie using little more than her (albeit cute) face. Somehow she did.
It's a different type of movie, probably not one for everybody but I've seen so many worse than this. Watch it for nothing more than curiosity, but give it (her) a shot.