Save Yourselves! – A Silly Yet Relatable Sci-Fi Comedy (Early Review)

Sometimes a film with a great premise is more than enough to entice audiences to watch. Add a good cast, like Sunita Mani (Glow), Ben Sinclair (High Maintenance), and John Early (Late Night, Search Party), and it gives you more reason to want to see the film. Save Yourselves tells the story of Su (Mani) and Jack (Reynolds), a Brooklyn couple, who just like so many of us, can’t seem to get away from the internet or their phones. So as a way to feel refreshed, they decided to go to their friend Raph’s (Sinclair) cottage for a week to ditch the outside world and recharge themselves, and not their phones. The downside is, the weekend they chose happens to coincide with an alien invasion as one does. 

Save Yourselves features quite a lot of truth when it comes to how our lives are entirely attached to our phones and the internet. It can be borderline scary how we depend or having our phone has become a necessity.  The film plays this for comedy comedy which was kind of wonderful but there was also plenty of drama there as well. Not a lot of stakes can be felt, but they are. While the phones are away, Su still finds a way to turn to the internet to reconnect with Jack and reconcile with where they both were at that point in their lives. Some couples and some people do have a tendency to hide behind their phones for answers, and the film tackles that aspect as well. 

The film took that premise and essentially turned it to 11 for comedic effect, the aforementioned aliens aren’t the typical green humanoids that some might imagine at first, but instead, they’re multi-coloured fluff balls. While they may look adorable, they’re also very deadly. Though this is a common trope, it works here. While the film’s humour lands, majorly thanks to Mani and Reynolds’ performances and chemistry, at the same time, the majority of the film is seemingly spent waiting for the next story beat. Some of the recurring humor is hilarious, however, the story was on the predictable side at times. That being said, nothing is ever wrong with being predictable as long as those aspects are executed well.

In the end, Save Yourselves is the kind of film that gets better after a second watch. There are moments in the film that make it feel like it might work better as a short film while others make it feel a bit padded out. Overall, this is yet another example of the kind of film that works best as a result of word of mouth and VOD. It is both a cute and strangely relatable experience, minus the fluff balls of aliens of course.

still courtesy of levelFilm

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Guest Writer