No One Will Save You

There’s hardly any dialogue in the surprisingly effective new alien thriller No One Will Save You, which has things to say about guilt and feelings of isolation along with delivering alien thrills. Brynn (Kaitlyn Dever) lives alone in the house where she grew up, nursing the loss of her mother and her childhood friend Maude, to whom she still writes letters. One night, an alien comes to visit, getting around on tippy-toes that look like thumbs. Brynn spends much of the movie trying to hide from, escape, and otherwise evade the aliens. The movie’s title refers to the fact that everyone in her small town has turned on her. Brynn is on her own.

Brian Duffield (Spontaneous) has written and directed No One Will Save You with a healthy respect for odd sounds as well as silence. Brynn is alone most of the time and trying to keep quiet, so it makes sense for there to be (almost) no dialogue. The movie works as a creature feature, albeit one in which we’re not quite sure what the aliens want — but then again, neither is Brynn. She’s sure, however, that they intend something ominous and nasty. They’ve seemingly already taken over the bodies of some folks in town, steering them awkwardly towards Brynn, whose private pain they appear to find interesting. (Judging from this film and the recent Landscape with Invisible Hand, we humans are terrific entertainment for the gray men.)

The filmmaking, proceeding by image and sound alone, is nicely accomplished pure cinema. There wouldn’t be much of a movie, though, if Duffield didn’t have an expressive actor like Kaitlyn Dever at its center. Dever runs a fairly large spectrum of emotion here; her Brynn is human and flawed but tough when she needs to be. What happened between Brynn and Maude is something we don’t find out till near the end, and Dever conveys a feeling of a rock of sorrow sitting heavily in her stomach. We have no trouble reading Brynn emotionally, even if we share her confusion. Nobody stands around burping exposition. Brynn and we are on our own in this thorny narrative filled with chittering, weirdly articulated beasties, whose designs only become clear once we consider one of Brynn’s hobbies — recreating her town via little model houses.

Are we meant to take the movie’s events literally? There’s room for an interpretation that’s part 2001, part Bradbury’s “Mars Is Heaven.” The ending can therefore be viewed through a dark or rose-colored lens. No One Will Save You is the sort of mid-budget gem that’s all but disappeared from multiplexes; people want to credit Barbenheimer with rejuvenating the theatrical experience, but Barbie and Oppenheimer, aside from their qualities, were $100 million behemoths backed by major studios and corresponding marketing campaigns. So a trim, affecting movie like this one, which clearly wants to elicit emotions other than “boo!” scares (though it deals in those, too), has to premiere on the streaming service Hulu.

I can only hope that the movie, like Hulu’s equally deserving Prey, will emerge on physical media someday. It’s earned the chance to sit on shelves and in library collections, and I’d prefer it didn’t withdraw into the fog of Hulu back content after a month. It needs to be stumbled upon, discovered. The film isn’t anything radical or brilliant; it just devises a good story and tells it honestly, and isn’t that something we all miss? As for the ending, depending on one’s mood it could be taken as a cold shot or as a warming gift, and I’m in the mood to leave Kaitlyn Dever’s Brynn in a place happier than the one in which we met her.

Dazed and Confused

Richard Linklater’s third feature Dazed and Confused opened in theaters 30 years ago September 24 — and closed not too much later. It took a while to become the beloved cult comedy it is now, but it’s in the canon — literally, it’s in the Criterion Collection — and the more years pass, the more touching it seems. Watching it as a 23-year-old back in 1994, when it hit video, I didn’t grasp the film’s wistfulness, its borderline melancholia. But it’s there. The then-31-year-old Linklater takes us back to 1976, when he was sixteen, and he gets a great deal of what’s in the air when kids are looking at their last year in high school. I was too young in ’76 to know whether Dazed and Confused is faithful to the details of being in high school then, but it feels authentic. It’s authentic whenever. At the end, when a few of the kids hop in a car the morning after a party to go snag Aerosmith tickets, I guarantee you you’ve been in that car. In 1976, 1986, whenever.

If the movie has a hero, or throughline character, it’s probably the freshman Mitch Kramer (Wiley Wiggins), who’s clearly Linklater’s avatar. Mitch drifts through the action, taken under various seniors’ wings. There is bullying and a thriving hazing environment in this small-town Texas community, and some not-terribly-progressive views of sex and women, and Linklater acknowledges that. The senior girls are always chastising the boys for being pigs. Most of Dazed and Confused is a collective portrait, moving from group to group, from pool hall to party to bedrooms where kids just get stoned. (There’s no sex in the film, but a lot of talk about it.) It’s the last day of school, and we follow various kids as they make their way to one party that never happens and then another that gets organized in a hurry.

Despite the bullies, the prevailing mood is fellowship and good cheer. Mitch is due to be paddled as part of the hazing, and Linklater gets that out of the way fast so Mitch (and we) won’t have to spend the movie dreading the paddling. Linklater doesn’t really divide the kids by social cliques. Some of the boys are football players, but that’s Texas high school. Other than that, it seems to be a mix of kids who mostly get along, with weed and beer as their glue. Linklater films the kids hanging out, some of them knowing it won’t get better than this. The moral center of the jocks, Randall “Pink” Floyd (Jason London), Linklater’s other avatar here, even says that if anyone catches him saying these were the best years of his life, remind him to kill himself. But the movie’s vibe is warm and good-natured, and we feel welcomed along with Mitch into the world of the cool older kids.

There’s one thread of plot having to do with a pledge the jocks are expected to sign that they won’t get high. Pink refuses to sign, for reasons he’s barely able to articulate. Nobody gets any big speeches; the most quotable character is ol’ Wooderson (Matthew McConaughey, right at the beginning of it all) with his bit about getting older while high-school girls stay the same age. The way McConaughey plays Wooderson, though, he comes off less a sketchy statutory rapist than a guy who’s still, in his heart, a high-school senior and always will be. Linklater doesn’t rely on dialogue; we fill in the blanks of what’s not said, deducing, for instance, that Ben Affleck’s manically outraged two-time senior O’Bannion is nursing deep regrets and pain that he tries to work out by paddling the living shit out of freshmen.

I suppose it would take a woman who went to high school in the ‘70s to make a Dazed and Confused from the girls’ point of view, but Linklater, while kind of staying in his white-male lane, does well by the girls. He gets a vivid performance from Parker Posey as Darla, the senior who adores being sadistic to the freshman girls; he also has a habit of lingering on one girl or another for a few beats so we can sense their boredom or exasperation with the boys — or their interest in them. The wall-to-wall needle-drop soundtrack does a lot of the emotional heavy lifting, giving the whole movie the tempo and mood of a breezy car ride on a mild summer night. It’s a beauty of a film and an instant pick-me-up, but with enough sad insight to recognize that the moments that shine the most fade the quickest.

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I didn’t quite have the right place to get this in, but it occurs to me with a chill that Dazed and Confused is now almost twice as many years past as the year 1976 was when the film came out. It is 30 years old, and when it came out in 1993, 1976 was only 17 years in the rearview (but seemed so much longer ago). 1976 is now, of course, of the Late Cretaceous Epoch.

Landscape with Invisible Hand

One would think, as many others have said, that extraterrestrial visitors would probably want to give Earth a wide berth. Aliens don’t need to destroy the planet — we’re doing a fair job of that ourselves. The aliens in Landscape with Invisible Hand, a mopey sci-fi drama, take over Earth because they want to save us from ourselves — or so they say. Called “the Vuvv,” they rule from offworld colonies and resemble “gooey coffee tables.” Through translators, the Vuvv lay down the law: Anything that does not enrich or amuse them is not worth the space it inhabits. They try to be polite about it, but they find themselves conquering an easily cowed species, except for a few rebellious types.

We follow the Campbell family. Beth (Tiffany Haddish), the mother, was once an attorney; now she has resumes out to fast-food chains. (Which, I guess, are still permitted to exist. The worldbuilding here probably doesn’t bear much deep thought.) Her son Adam (Asante Blackk) is a budding artist; the movie has eyes for him but more or less forgets about his sister Natalie (Brooklynn MacKinzie). Adam gets friendly with Chloe (Kylie Rogers), a fellow student in his art class. They kiss but seem more like casual friends than boyfriend/girlfriend. Regardless, Chloe hears about a way for them to make money by wearing “nodes” that allow the Vuvv to watch their romance; the aliens find human love fascinating.

That might have been sufficient for an interesting premise, but writer-director Cory Finley, adapting a YA novel by M.T. Anderson, more or less drops that thread in favor of showing the Vuvv’s demands bringing indignity to the Campbells and to Chloe’s family, who live in the Campbells’ basement. What if one or both of the couple were gay yet had to keep up the ruse of playing straight? Instead, the Vuvv hold the threat of “debt for six generations” over the humans’ heads, leading to first Beth and then Chloe’s father playing wife to a Vuvv who only knows about family and marriage from what it’s seen on Earth television from the ‘50s. Watching Tiffany Haddish trying to play a good stereotypical wifey to a gooey coffee table should be funnier than it is. A lot of stuff here should be.

Haddish only really gets her blood up in one scene, but it has no consequences since Chloe’s father apparently seamlessly steps into the wife role (it seems we all look the same to the Vuvv). Landscape tries to be an allegory about corporations deforming human life, but there’s a distinct lack of intriguing details, and though the plot eventually brings in a Vuvv who appreciates Adam’s art and offers him an elite position to ply his trade, its appreciation is only on the level of commerce and propaganda. Well, what if there were Vuvv with artistic, or at least not totally mercenary, sensibilities? The Vuvv are all boringly the same; they all have matching quirks and dominating personae. They don’t seem to have been thought out in dramatic terms — or comedic; the movie comes perilously close to being neither/nor, or null. 

Sometimes it enters that territory anyway. Haddish brings some gravitas to the scenes where her Beth frets about providing for her family; she plays Beth’s reality with all the pained honesty, clinging to whatever dignity she can, of an actor who once lived in her car. But that’s about it for emotional realism. We don’t really care about Adam and Chloe’s relationship, even if its failure means debtors’ prison for the family. Cory Finley apparently has bigger fish to fry, but any satirical points are so obvious as to be a big blur — we wait for something to flip the script, for someone among the Vuvv to act opposed to Vuvv dictates. But they don’t. They oppress, and the humans do what they must to survive. The result is more depressing than insightful or entertaining.

The Boogeyman

Stephen King’s 1973 short story “The Boogeyman” gave me a few sleepless nights when I was a kid. For King, the tale arose from his fears of his children dying. For kids, it was even scarier: a monster could come for you in the night, and your parents couldn’t stop it. The story is told by Lester Billings, who has lost three of his young children to what they described as “the boogeyman,” a thing that hunkers down in dark closets, waiting to strike. Lester isn’t very relatable — he doesn’t seem to like his wife or kids, and he’s actually kind of a huge prick — so we suspect, like others in his life, that he himself killed the kids and made up the boogeyman as a sort of coping mechanism. But no, the boogeyman is very real … although we may wonder to what extent the monster has acted on a resentful father’s suppressed desire to be rid of the shackles of family.

The new movie version (there was a cheesy short version forty years ago, usually packaged with a much better Frank Darabont short also based on King) takes an entirely different psychological tack. For one thing, Lester — in the person of the likable, sometimes painfully vulnerable David Dastmalchian — is presented in his limited screen time as a genuinely bereaved father who needs to make sense of what happened. A better movie might have wanted to follow Lester on his journey, but he — and, sadly, Dastmalchian — exit the picture early, leaving us with the therapist Lester visits, Dr. Will Harper (Chris Messina), and his two daughters.

I won’t abandon him as quickly as the film does; I find David Dastmalchian a fascinating, hooded presence. He can be creepy or friendly (or both), and he just pulls us naturally into whatever his character is feeling. His haunted, agonized features promise a much more impactful horror movie than The Boogeyman turns out to be. When he goes, the movie I wanted goes with him, and I was stuck with Dr. Harper, sullen teen Sadie (Sophie Hatcher) and cute-as-a-button Sawyer (Vivien Lyra Blair) as they grappled with the death of Dr. Harper’s wife. Thematically, this family’s pain isn’t very satisfying because the boogeyman isn’t drawn to grief. It just wants to drink the life out of children, and the only reason it imprints on Dr. Harper and his daughters is that Lester (unknowingly) brought it there. It’s said their weakness in time of grief makes them easier targets for it, but I was still left wondering why this story wasn’t about Lester and his growing terror and madness when his children kept being killed.

It took three guys to work up the script pitting two brave girls against a monster who doesn’t like the light. A couple of clever moments come out of this, such as when the younger girl, playing a videogame, makes the TV screen flash just long enough to reveal the boogeyman creeping in the shadows of the room. Whoever designed, rendered and animated the monster has earned a salute, and director Rob Savage is shrewd about how much of the boogeyman he shows us, and when. The atmosphere is heavy, with just about the only levity coming from Sadie’s high-school friends, one of whom is annoying enough that we want the boogeyman to visit her.

Nine out of ten horror directors think a dynamic soundtrack will scare us, and Savage certainly isn’t the exception. The movie gets plotty and goal-oriented when it should be parking itself quietly in front of a closet door creaking open by itself and letting us fill the darkness with our own fearful demons. If you’ve seen enough horror movies, you know all the tropes and all the techniques. So sometimes a frightening sequence in an otherwise non-horror film — I always cite the room full of mummies in Raiders of the Lost Ark or the terrifying figure behind the dumpster in Mulholland Drive — hits us squarely in the fear center, because we don’t see it coming. We horror-movie buffs may still have fun at a horror movie — even The Boogeyman has its enjoyable bits — but as far as genuine scares, well, that ship sailed for most of us somewhere in our teens. The Boogeyman isn’t scary, but it could have been. The source material was right there. David Dastmalchian was right there.