Since making her professional acting debut about a decade-and-a-half ago, Kaitlyn Dever has done a great deal to prove her versatility as a performer – not letting her young age be any impediment. Be it comedies like Bad Teacher, Party Down, or Last Man Standing, or drama like Justified, Short Term 12, and Dopesick, she has shown remarkable range. One thing she isn’t particularly versed in, however, is being an action star… but that was something that she and writer/director Brian Duffield set out to change in the making of the new alien home invasion thriller No One Will Save You.
In the film (which is now available to stream with a Hulu subscription), Dever plays a young woman who is isolated from her community and must find some way to survive when her house is besieged by extraterrestrials. The character, Brynn, isn’t a survivalist, ex-military or a martial arts expert; she is just an ordinary loner in a fight for her life against mysterious attackers. When I spoke with Brian Duffield earlier this month about Dever’s performance, he highlighted both his star’s passion for the physicality and how her acting background enhanced the character. Said the filmmaker,
I think it added to the experience of how mismatched the fight is and then how she’s able to be resilient. I think you’re really impressed because she’s not Charlize [Theron] or [Tom] Cruise; it’s a totally different skill. And I think she was really excited to get on wires and do stunts and do such a physical role and get to make Brynn alive because of that physicality and almost becoming feral by the end of the movie. She was really, really excited about that physical challenge, and it was hard. It was really hard on her, but she was so into it. It was great.
There is an impact that casting can have on stakes in a movie. To borrow Brian Duffield’s examples, when you’re watching a Charlize Theron or Tom Cruise action movie, a room full of adversaries isn’t that threatening because the audience has seen the stars as their maximum badass potential. Kaitlyn Dever may one day become a Marvel hero or pull off a “Linda Hamilton in Terminator 2”-esque transformation and become a blockbuster lead doing all her own stunts, but she isn’t there yet, and that adds to the peril in No One Will Save You.
Going into the making of the new sci-fi horror film, Brian Duffield was well aware of Kaitlyn Dever’s talents and what she could do, and in casting her as Brynn, he was excited by her excitement about all of the movie’s craziness:
She was so excited to do a really physical performance. If you’ve seen like Unbelievable or Dopesick, you’re like, ‘Oh, she can do drama for days.’ And then you see Booksmart and you’re like, ‘She’s the funniest kid alive.’ But I like that I hadn’t seen her throw a fist so much. I couldn’t remember one of those. And so it was so cool to put her in a movie where you’re like, I’ve never seen her wield a lightsaber, and now I have to watch this girl figure out how to survive.
As the filmmaker said, it’s a different kind of action than fight choreography or gunplay, and I won’t spoil the kind of things that Kaitlyn Dever gets up to in the film, but it’s certainly impressive and looks exhausting.
Playing Brynn is complicated for many reasons, but Dever’s turn in No One Will Save You is one of the key reasons to watch the movie – as has been highlighted by many critics. Speaking with Brian Duffield, it’s immensely clear how proud he is of what she does. He told me,
She’s such an insane actress. You look at that IMDb page and it’s just banger after banger performance. I cast Kaitlyn and I remember telling my manager, I was like, ‘I’m 60% done.’ [laugh] It really is. She is like… it’s not even like a windup. She just comes and does it and you’re just like, ‘Oh, well, great!’ A lot of my direction was like, ‘Maybe a little faster.’ She’s gonna be an awesome director someday.
No One Will Save You is new and available to stream on Hulu, and as I note in my CinemaBlend review, it’s one of the best horror films you’ll see this year. Check it out, and then head back here for our breakdown of the movie’s wild ending.