“No One Will Save You”, which is currently on Disney+ in South Korea, is a little horror film which depends a lot on its talented lead actress’ strong performance. Nearly wordless throughout the film, she deftly swings around several different emotional modes ranging from fear to despair, and her skillful acting firmly carries the film even during its rather shaky last act.

Katilyn Dever, a wonderful actress who has steadily impressed us since her harrowing supporting turn in Destin Daniel Cretton’s little but undeniably powerful independent drama “Short Term 12” (2013), plays a young girl named Brynn, and the opening part of the film succinctly establishes how isolated Brynn’s daily life is. She lives alone in a big cozy house located in the middle of a forest area, and she does not interact much with others even when she drops by a nearby village at one point early in the film. When she happens to notice two certain persons she seems to know, she only watches them from the distance while also hiding from their sight, and we gather that there is some disagreeable past between her and them.

Anyway, as she returns to her home later and is subsequently about to sleep at night, Brynn suddenly hears some strange sounds from somewhere inside the house, and that is where the movie starts to become more suspenseful. She carefully gets out of her upstairs bedroom, and then she sees something is moving in the downstairs kitchen. Naturally quite terrified, she tries not to make any unnecessary noise, but, of course…

Now I have to be a bit more discreet about describing the rest of the film, but now I sincerely suggest to you that you stop reading my inconsequential review if you have already become interested in watching it. Although its promotional poster does not hide at all what is exactly menacing its heroine, I think it is better for you not to know anything about that especially if you really want to enjoy the movie as much as possible.

After an intense moment of hide and sick between her and that mysterious entity, Brynn naturally tries to handle the situation as much she can, but, as you can already guess from the very title of the film, there is no one around her to help her while it also seems that there is no possible way to get away from her increasingly disturbing circumstance. Yes, she could just go to the police, but then she comes across the last persons she wants to face right now. Furthermore, as shown from one brief but frightening moment, it also looks like whatever is menacing her does not want her to leave the area at all.

Like many other terrified horror movie heroines, Brynn gradually comes to confront her personal demons as getting scared more and more along the story. It is eventually revealed later in the story that there was indeed some bad incident in her past, and we are not so surprised to see that the only line in the entire film comes from her old guilt associated with that incident.

Meanwhile, the movie keeps accumulating more suspense and terror around its heroine, and director/writer/co-producer Brian Duffield, who previously made a feature debut with “Spontaneous” (2020), and his crew members including cinematographer Aaron Morton have a field day with serving us one tense moment after another. There are several nice scary scenes to corner our heroine here and there, and I particularly like a chilling overhead shot showing a number of signs on the ground which clearly show us the overwhelming magnitude of her circumstance.

Despite getting frustrated or despaired again and again, Brynn somehow does not lose her will to survive and escape, and she comes to us an engaging character for whom we can root along the story. Although she does not say or express much on the surface except looking quite scared at times, Dever, who also participated in the production of the film as one of its executive producers, ably fills her archetype role with enough nuances and details, and her good performance diligently holds the whole show together from the beginning to the end.

In case of the main source of the menace against Brynn in the film, this story element is a fairly effective genre tool for generating enough horror and suspense to hold our attention, but I must tell you that it is also one of several weaker aspects of the movie. Although the special effects in the film are not bad at all on the whole, the movie actually works better whenever it simply focuses more on Dever’s terrified face while not showing anything else much on the screen. In addition, we never get to know anything about why Brynn and her surrounding environment were targeted from the beginning, and the movie does not explain that much even during the finale where our heroine fully confronts what has been terrifying her so much.

Overall, “No One Will Save You” did not really scare me a lot, but I enjoyed its little genre exercise in addition to appreciating Dever’s commendable efforts and the competent direction of Duffield, who is mostly known for writing the screenplays for several notable genre films such as “Love and Monsters” (2020) and “Underwater” (2020). Although it is not the scariest film of this fall, the movie achieves as much as well while generating enough thrill and entertainment, so I will not grumble for now.