No One Will Save You (2023) - Movie Review

This feels like the kind of flex every screenwriter-cum-director wants to make. After making his mark with some incredibly well-scripted efforts with The Babysitter, Love And Monsters, and even his directorial debut with Spontaneous, it looks like Brian Duffield wanted to show that he could tell a great story without even needing dialogue. And indeed, this is a film about a largely-mute protagonist who says all of one line, and the rest of the cast are just as silent. As someone who has been growing to love Duffield’s cinematic work, I was definitely curious about how such a venture would shape out.

Love And Monsters (2021) - Movie Review

After absolutely crushing it last year with Spontaneous, a film I truly hope will go down as one of the most poignant statements on the Millennial generation (my generation), writer Brian Duffield seems to have found his calling in creating coming-of-age stories in truly bizarre situations. With Love And Monsters, that takes the form of Joel, a young-adult survivor of the apocalypse (basically, in stopping a meteor, we wound up mutating all of our animal life into the things that killed off most of the human population) who sets out across the wilderness to reunite with his love Aimee. It is every bit as effective as Spontaneous, and might even go a few steps further.

Spontaneous (2020) - Movie Review

Always fun to see a screenwriter step into the director’s chair for the first time. Doubly so since, in the case of Brian Duffield, it means he can maintain control over his own story, which seems to be a recurring issue in his filmography. Any time he gets brought in as co-writer for just about anything, it doesn’t turn out well: Insurgent, the clustered production of Jane Got A Gun, even Underwater from earlier this year. And given what happened when he stepped out alone with The Babysitter, hell yeah, I want to see him continue on that path. And while his latest certainly carries a similar sense of gory fun that helped make Babysitter so damn cool, there’s also a heavy, heavy sense of melancholy to be found here as well.