Directed by Alex Huston Fischer and Eleanor Wilson
Starring Sunita Mani and John Reynolds
Running time: 1 hour and 33 Minutes
MPAA Rating: R for language

by Ian Hrabe

If you ever wondered what War of the Worlds would be like as a mumblecore indie comedy, Save Yourselves! has you covered! But you know what? Considering how many indie relationship dramas there are out there about characters in their early 30s trying to navigate adulthood, adding an alien invasion to the mix is a novel idea that sets this film apart. 

The opening act of Save Yourselves! finds Su (Sunita Mani of GLOW and Mr. Robot) and Jack (John Reynolds of Search Party and Stranger Things) living your typical aimless early thirties lifestyle in Brooklyn. They sit on the couch looking at their phones to the point where they can’t even have sex without being pulled back into the cold blue-light of their screens. When a friend offers them a visit to his cabin upstate, they use it as an opportunity to disconnect from their internet and social media driven lives and reconnect to the world and each other. And of course the second their phones are turned off and put away aliens invade the earth.

Su and Jack are doing well in their new unplugged existence, blissfully unaware of the chaos ensuing in the outside world (and sometimes right outside their cabin). John Reynolds and Sunita Mani have great chemistry and, despite the screenplay’s tendency to dabble in cliches, they have enough charisma to make it work. Once the aliens--in the form of adorable furry poof balls--show up at their cabin and they turn on their phones to find the world under attack, the reality of their helplessness sets in. There is a throughline of millennial helplessness that builds in the film’s first half that pays off in the back end, and it’s where the film draws most of its humor. “I can’t even tell if a bathroom is dirty,” Jack says as they are discussing their lack of real world skills. Procuring a gun from the basement leads to a discussion about the statistics of the risks of having a gun in the home. 

And yet Jack and Su aren’t total millennial stereotypes. This isn’t a Clint Eastwood movie where an angry man shakes his fist at the new generation that can’t chop wood or handle a rifle. Society has changed so much that it makes perfect sense that there is a generation that can’t really fend for themselves when the shit goes down. That’s why we make sourdough starters or build woodworking shops in our garages. There is a desire to do something tangible when a lot of us spend our working lives sitting in front of computer screens and our home lives staring at our phones. It’s a cycle that’s hard to break out of, but Save Yourselves! argues that it’s not too hard to ditch your phone for a week and get back to a more grounded reality. Granted, that ultimately involves learning some valuable survival skills on the fly while fleeing cute, puffy, kill-crazy aliens, but at least those skills aren’t totally out of reach for this fully digitally integrated generation. 

While Save Yourselves! is worth a look, most of that is due to Mani and Reynolds carrying a script that isn’t quite all there for first time feature directors (Eleanor Wilson and Alex Huston Fischer) who don’t quite have a handle on pacing. The first half of the film is very slow in a way that feels like it should be going for a slow-burn but doesn’t have the necessary tension to do so and it drags hard. Things even out a little more once Jack and Su are on the run, before slamming into an ending that is just too undercooked to be satisfying (and too close to the ending of the awful Nic Cage flick Knowing than I am comfortable with). That may sound like a laundry list of complaints, but it’s amazing what a couple of super charming performances can do to turn a movie around. 

Save Yourselves! is in select theaters starting today and available on demand or blu-ray disc October 6.