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We meet Brynn (Kaitlyn Dever), a woman who mostly keeps to herself and ignored by the people in her town. It is slowly revealed that Brynn is mourning the loss of her friend, Maude.
Brynn lives on the outskirts of the town in her late mother's house and barely talks to anyone. To pass the time Brynn makes models of her home and of her town as well as other arts and crafts. One night, she hears a noise and thinks it's raccoons, but it's actually a humanoid alien. She tries to escape but the alien is able to use telekinesis to control her. But by sheer luck, Brynn accidentally stabs the alien in the head and saves her own life.
As she enters town, she sees the destruction the aliens have wrought. She heads to the police station, where the chief and his wife turn her away. The wife even spits in her face. It's revealed that they're the parents of Maude.
Brynn boards the bus to leave town, but they don't get far when the other people on the bus reveal themselves to be aliens. Brynn has to battle her way off the bus. She runs through a graveyard, and sees a group of aliens surrounding Maude's grave. She heads home, where two more aliens attack her while retrieving the earlier dead alien's body.
After dispatching them, Brynn is almost sucked up into a flying saucer via a tractor beam, but manages to escape. And even larger alien stalks her through her home. It catches her and forces her to hallucinate a life where Maude is still alive, then it grows an identical double to Brynn.
Brynn forces herself out of this dream and runs into the woods, but her double chases her down. The two of them fight, with Brynn eventually killing her double. But her running down a deserted road attracts another flying saucer.
It's able to capture Brynn and inside, the aliens force her to remember that in the past, when the girls were very young, Brynn and Maude played in a field together. After horsing around, Brynn hits Maude with a heavy rock, killing her.
The aliens see this and send Brynn back to earth, without controlling her or possessing her. When Brynn wakes up, she's back in her undamaged house and everyone is going about the world as if it's normal, except that they all are nice and greet Brynn.
The film ends with Brynn dancing through the streets of her town over her trauma and back to a place where she has been forgiven and has forgiven herself.
Obviously, there's a lot to unpack when it comes to this movie. So what does it all mean?
Well, The Hollywood Reporter sat with Brian Duffield, the film's director, to breakdown what he was doing when making it.
When it comes to the character of Brynn in the movie, Duffield said, “She finally gets something that she didn’t think she would ever deserve, and I like the idea that this kid who has gone through so much had a really happy ending, as strange as it may be.” He continued, “I love horror movies that have a real slap-in-your-face ending, but I liked Brynn too much to slap her in the face.”
As you can see, the whole movie winds up being an allegory for forgiveness, where in humans cannot forgive Brynn for something she did as a kid, but these aliens, who are able to separate themselves from emotions, understand that Brynn has served her punishment and should be allowed back into society.
As Duffield told THR, "A lot of the ending stemmed from the idea that Brynn has spent all this time making her own world in a similar fashion to the aliens, and there is a little bit of a conversation to be had amongst these aliens that are now driving our bodies around, as it were. It felt like there was a little bit of a tongue in cheek, and everything that she had done in the first 10 minutes of the movie could be beneficial. I didn’t want the aliens to be too empathetic, but I also think they understood that Brynn was a worthy adversary that doesn’t have to be an adversary."
'No One Will Save You'
Credit: Hulu
Duffield told THR that when he was writing and making the film, there were a few movies and real-life cases that inspired the film.
He said, "There were a couple cases involving similar things that happened with young people, and I was probably unhealthily fixated on that. It was different from a school shooter, which is so bleak and awful. And then there were cases like the two girls involved in the [2014] Slender Man stabbing, where it felt like you were dealing with adolescents who made abhorrent mistakes. So how do you live the rest of your life after that? Heavenly Creatures is one of my favorite movies, and having done a deep dive on that movie, I found out that one of the girls changed her name [Juliet Hulme] and became a fairly successful author [Anne Perry] until that was uncovered about her."
After going into all that, Duffield turned to the character in his film.
He continued, "There was just something so sad and lonely about a young girl that was barely even in her teens and had her whole life decided in that one moment, and so that felt like a very interesting character. Now, she’s alone in her mother’s house, but she didn’t really have an adolescence. She genuinely loves what she loves. Kaitlyn [Dever] and I talked a lot about how Brynn is a 10-year-old’s idea of what a 30-year-old is, and part of that comes from her mom having a vintage aesthetic. Ramsey Avery, our production designer, was a huge part of this, too."
This was the movie of the weekend, we covered the controversial screenplay and I was happy to talk about the ending here.
I think movies like this really add something new to the genre, by layering in moral and emotional components that get us to connect with the characters right away.
Did you watch the film?
Let us know what you thought of the ending in the comments.
