SPOILER WARNING: The following article contains massive spoilers for No One Will Save You. If you have not yet seen the film, proceed at your own risk!
Sometimes you watch the end of a movie and just know that the discourse surrounding it is going to be fervent. The final moment of Inception is a relatively recent example that springs to mind, but there’s also the haunting twist of The Babadook and the shocking conclusion of Hereditary. Writer/director Brian Duffield’s No One Will Save You is the latest of these kinds of titles to be released, as it packs an unexpected ending that manages to be both happy and scary at the same time.
It’s a fascinating film all around, but we’ve put together this feature specifically with the aim of analyzing the special ending and the fate of Brynn Adams, the protagonist played by Kaitlyn Dever. Before we dig into the big mystery of the movie and Brian Duffield’s comments about how the final scenes came together, let’s first do a quick recap of what happens at the end of No One Will Save You...
What Happens At The End Of No One Will Save You
The beginning of the end of No One Will Save You comes as Brynn (Kaitlyn Dever) kills her alien clone before her alien clone can kill her – slicing her neck with a box cutter. When the clone dies, Brynn continues to try and run away, but her path is blocked by a massive, multi-legged extraterrestrial, and before she can even think about evading it, she gets trapped in a beam deployed by a floating UFO.
Brynn is pulled aboard the ship, and a group of the greys surround and analyze her while she remains paralyzed. One of them reaches out and puts a finger to her head, utilizing some kind of psychic ability. The protagonist suddenly finds herself inhabiting her own memories, and while she is at first happy to see her younger self doing crafts with her mother, she is then horrified to relive the incident that led her to be isolated from her home town: the death of her best friend, Maude. At first she can only observe events, but when she watches as her younger self writes an apology letter to her deceased best friend, Brynn is able to reach out and hold her hand.
Back in the present, the aliens discuss what they have witnessed, and they look up to the top of the ship as though awaiting an order from a higher authority. There are loud sounds and a bright light, and Brynn is ungracefully returned to Earth – dropped on the street where she was first abducted. She lies down in pain, still bleeding as a result of being stabbed by her clone, but after seeing some flashing colored lights in the sky, she begins to smile and laugh.
Sometime later during the day, Brynn happily puts on makeup in her bedroom and goes out for a bike ride – her face still showing healing cuts from her terrifying ordeal. When she waves at people in town, they no longer ignore her; instead, they smile and wave back… with the alien organisms in their throats wiggling and making their presence known. That evening, she attends a soiree and has the opportunity to dance and be happy and normal, all while UFOs gently float across the sky.
What Happened Between Brynn And Maude That Led To Brynn’s Isolation?
When we first meet Brynn in No One Will Save You, she is firmly entrenched in her life of solitude, but it’s never explicitly revealed why it is that she has been rejected by her community. We know that it has something to do with Maude Collins, her childhood best friend, but the movie remains vague about what actually happened. It’s made clear that it was something awful – most notably illustrated by the reaction the character gets when she accidentally runs into Maude’s parents – but it’s not until the end of the film that we learn what went down.
As revealed in the aforementioned alien-induced flashback, Brynn and Maude were having some kind of heated argument that escalated to the point where Maude pushed Brynn down to the ground. Filled with anger and not thinking rationally, the film’s protagonist instinctively grabbed a rock and proceeded to hit her friend on the head with it. An instance of horrible luck, the blow was fatal.
The film doesn’t get into the legal consequences that Brynn faced for the accidental death, but that’s arguably incidental in light of the prison that she has built for herself. She finds some happiness for herself in dressmaking and various crafts, but she is ensconced in grief and guilt and her entire life is trapped behind that one mistake. Through the alien home invasion she experiences, she finally has a true confrontation with all of her feelings, and she changes in a major way… while the world also very much changes around her.
Writer/Director Brian Duffield Kept Waiting For Somebody To Say “No” To His Wild No One Will Save You Ending, And Nobody Ever Did
If No One Will Save You were to end in a more traditional manner, it would conclude with Brynn working to build a new ordinary life for herself in a still ordinary world, having emotionally grown in the aftermath of her alien encounter. Instead, she comes out of her adventure a healthier person, but the world that she is living in has been conquered by otherworldly visitors.
When I spoke with writer/director Brian Duffield about the movie earlier this month during the film’s virtual press day, I specifically asked about the atypical ending and how it came together. The filmmaker explained that a big part of the equation was simply wanting to let the story on a happy note for his protagonist, saying,
I think it stems out of that I really loved her. I love Brynn and again, not outlining, I'm kind of like, 'I don't know where this is going, but I know I'm not gonna be cruel to her at the end.' 'Cause I like horror movies that have like those cruel, slap-in-the-face endings, but I was like, 'I like this. She's gone through enough. Like that's not fair, not fun.' And then I can't remember when I had the idea, but I remember being like, 'That's a bold ending that no one will let me do.' And then I wrote it and I was like, 'I really like that this is the ending.' And I think originally that had even less tee up than before, so it felt like a little too far out of left field.
Even after Brian Duffield adjusted his script to feature more setup for his desired ending, he still kept waiting for the other shoe to drop and for someone to tell him that it all needed to change. Ultimately, he got a suggestion for the last shot of the movie that ended up being used (the UFOs flying in the sky), but he otherwise didn’t field any arguments to alter what he had come up with. Duffield continued,
As I kind of massaged it into place, I kept waiting for someone to be like, 'Why is this happening?' And then, like the dialogue thing, it never came up and everyone was like super excited when we shot it . And I kept waiting for like that moment! And it never came. The very, very end of the movie, like the very last shot, that was something that [president of 20th Century Studios] Steve Asbell pitched in post, and we were all kinda like, 'That's pretty good.' But it was never like, 'Why is this happening?' It was kinda like, 'This is a really funny thing.' I think when people watch the movie, they'll see I think we played really fair with it.
It’s a great lesson for all creatives out there: don’t just create something that you think other people want to see; always go with your boldest and best ideas, and you may get the opportunity to execute them.
No One Will Save You is now available to stream with a Hulu subscription, and you can discover all of the new films set to be released between now and the end of the year by checking out our 2023 Movie Release Calendar.
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