Hallowatch 2026 No. 3: No One Will Save You (2023)

Day 3. Spoilers follow; here's the wikipedia synopsis.

What if the real alien feeling was forgiveness all along? This one was goofy, man. I feel like everything from the doppelganger onward is all just sentimental claptrap. I think this could've worked if it had a theatrical release, more of a controlled environment scenario, and then tweaked the home/streaming release to not be so dark and impossible to see anything, but alas. The creature feature pursuit-by-psychic aliens stuff all hit for me, the mind probing and subsequent "lets make a world for you to be happy in" truly did not. This is the kind of movie people talk about when they complain that horror movies are all about trauma now. I think a horror movie should fill you with a bleak nihilism, or a sense of "how did we not die", not a feeling like you talked to the spooky HR department for an accommodation and they agreed to it.

I found the no-dialogue gimmick kind of cute; I wish I would've turned off my phone for it though, I kept picking it up when a notification went off and then switching apps to go read posts, then realized I had no idea what happened in the last ten minutes. Rinse and repeat and it turned a 90 minute movie into a 180 minute movie. Bad habit of mine, for sure, but I don't feel like the experience was improved for not having dialogue.

Kaitlyn Dever did pretty good. The creature designs and effects? Also pretty good.

This has made me less enthused about the writer-director's next picture, Whalefall, which I now assume will have the main character swallowed by a whale and then propelled out its blowhole on an umbrella of water. 110 minutes, $12/ticket.

Anyhow. This isn't a movie to spend 500 words on, it was very middle of the road for writing, and I probably won't re-watch it. I feel like I already re-watched it. God help me if this spawns sequels or gets back into the zeitgeist somehow, I'm not farting around with it a second time, there's just not enough there to enjoy. I'm filing it under "this movie could have been an X-File".

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